Outstanding Grad Alum, Dr. Steve Rains, Visits CMS

Dr. Steve Rains was honored at an event on September 19 as our 2026 Outstanding Graduate Program Alum. Graduate advisor Rene Dailey presented him with the award prior to Steve delivering some remarks about his time in the program, his research, and his advice for graduate students currently in the program. 

Rains’ visit to campus included a mentoring lunch with current graduate students as well as open office hours with faculty and students. Rains also delivered a talk to a full room on “Publishing in Communication Journals: A Conversation with Communication Research editor Steve Rains.” Department graduate students and faculty celebrated him at an awards reception and a small dinner during his stay here.

Rains graduated from our program in 2005. He was hired into the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona (where he still works now as a full Professor) and has grown a very strong multi-branch program of research. His work centers on health communication, social influence, and communication and technology, primarily focusing on understanding how and why messages influence people in health contexts and when using communication technologies. His work overlaps with many in our department still: he looks at social support, digital coping, incivility, persuasion resistance, and uses computational social science tools. As such, he was an excellent representative of our department when he graduated and remains so still today.

Part of what makes Rains such an outstanding alum is that he has over 120 publications, over 20 chapters or encyclopedia entries, and a sole-authored book entitled Coping with Illness Digitally. He regularly publishes in our flagship journals such as Human Communication Research (HCR), Communication Monographs, Communication Research, Journal of Communication, and Health Communication. He is consistently ranked among the top 1% of scholars in our field based on research productivity. Not only does he conduct high-quality individual studies of his own, but he has helped publish 17 systematic reviews and meta-analyses—some being systematic reviews of meta-analyses. He has taken all the pieces of various puzzles to provide more definitive conclusions on topics such as: information seeking, portrayals on outgroup evaluations, affectionate communication and health; guilt appeals in persuasion; digital stigma coping; online social support messages; psychological reactance; and more recently, health-focused conversational AI.

Rains served as an Associate Editor of HCR from 2016-2019 and is currently serving as the Editor of Communication Research since 2023. He was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2023. He currently has or has supervised a dozen doctoral advisees as well as 4 master’s students in addition to serving on dozens of master’s and doctoral committees. 

Rains’ dissertation work (supervised by Dr. Craig Scott), which received the National Communication Association Group Communication Division Dissertation Award, was titled What’s in a Name? Two Studies Examining the Impact of Anonymity on Perceptions of Source Credibility and Influence. As Dr. Dailey noted, “His dissertation has all the hallmarks of a great quantitative project. The topic of how anonymous others are perceived and how we interpret their information was and remains a timely and important topic.”  

Dr. Scott, who recounted moments in his 25 years of knowing Steve (since his arrival in the Ph.D. program back in 2001), added that “Steve Rains is a great model for what a scholar in our field should look like. We are so proud to recognize him as a truly outstanding alum of this program.” Indeed, the department congratulates this year’s Outstanding Graduate Program Alum, Dr. Steve Rains!