Carolyn Byerly
Principal Investigator
Carolyn Byerly is the principal investigator for the Global Report on Women in the News Media. She developed the methodology for the project, which she coordinates.
Byerly is an associate professor in the department of journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she has worked since 2004. Previously, Byerly was an assistant visiting professor at the University of Maryland-College Park and a lecturer and assistant professor at various other universities.
Byerly’s courses and research focus primarily on women, communication, writing, journalism and gender. She has co-authored two books on women and media – Women and Media: A Critical Introduction and Women and Media: International Perspectives.
Byerly holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in communication from the University of Washington.
Jagruti Bhakta
Project Assistant
Jagruti Bhakta is a project assistant for the Global Report on Women in the News Media. She assists with communication, research and writing for the project.
Bhakta has previously worked as a paralegal for Rutherford & Christie, LLP, in Atlanta, Ga. She has interned at the American Civil Liberties Union in Atlanta and for a Georgia State Senate campaign. She also worked as a research assistant in the anthropology department at the University of Georgia.
Bhakta is working on a master’s degree in international affairs from American University and holds bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and international affairs from the University of Georgia.
Hongmei Shen
Statistician
Hongmei Shen is the statistician for the Global Report on Women in the News Media. She works on survey design and data analysis for the project.
Since fall 2006, Shen has been a teaching assistant for communications courses at the University of Maryland-College Park. She has also worked as a communication intern for the Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives at the National Institutes of Health. She will join the communications faculty at San Diego State University in fall 2009.
Shen is working toward a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland-College Park, from which she holds a master’s degree. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Renmin University in China.
Bella Ezumah
Graduate Intern
Bella Ezumah is a graduate intern for the Global Report on Women in the News Media. She assists the principal investigator in researching media trends.
She is a teaching assistant at Howard University, where she teaches topics such as mass communication theories, mass media and society and research methods. She has previously worked as the instructional technology program director at Trans Video Communications in New York.
Ezumah is working toward a Ph.D. from the Department of Mass Communication and Media Studies at Howard University. She holds a master’s degree in radio and television management from Brooklyn College in New York and a bachelor’s degree in communications studies from St. John’s University in New York.
Desrene Vernon
Graduate Intern
Desrene Vernon is a graduate intern for the Global Report on Women in the News Media. She assists the principal investigator in researching media trends.
Vernon is working toward a Ph.D. at Howard University. She is a research assistant in the Office of the President at Howard University. She has previously worked as an assistant professor in the communication department at Andrews University in Michigan. Vernon was also a lecturer and program coordinator for communication arts at Indiana University-South Bend.
Vernon holds a master’s degree in communication from Andrews University and a bachelor’s degree in television and radio from Brooklyn College in New York.
Regional Coordinators
Barbara Barnett
North America (United States)
Barbara Barnett is an associate professor of journalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas.
Barnett is a former reporter and editorial writer at The Charlotte News and The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. She also worked as a communications strategist for The Women’s Studies Project at Family Health International, a five-year social science study on women’s perception of family planning conducted in 14 developing countries.
Barnett holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a master’s degree from Duke University.
Maria Edstrom
Nordic Europe
Maria Edstrom is a senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
She previously spent 15 years as a journalist in Sweden, where she worked for various newspapers, magazines and national radio.
Edstrom is a board member of the Swedish Broadcasting Commission and a member of the international advisory board of Gender Links. She also serves as a vice chair in the gender section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research.
Edstrom holds a Ph.D. and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Gothenburg.
Juana Gallego Ayala
Spain
Juana Gallego Ayala is a senior lecturer in journalism at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona in Spain. Her main research focus is gender and communication, and she has researched and written extensively on these subjects, including a recent chapter of a book on gender stereotyping in the production of news.
Gallego is a member of the Women Journalist Association of Catalonia. In 2001, she won first prize for mass communication research from the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia for her research Into the Press, which analyzed four newspapers and one news agency.
Ngehndab Delphine Gwanvalla
West Africa
Ngehndab Delphine Gwanvalla is the editor of the environmental desk for Abakwa FM Radio in Cameroon.
Gwanvalla holds a master’s degree from Rhodes University in South Africa, where she completed research on gendered representation of poverty in the news media. Also while at Rhodes, Gwanvalla participated in a research project aimed at increasing readership for a community newspaper. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Buea in Cameroon.
Natacha Henry
France
Natacha Henry works for Gender Company, which she founded to promote gender awareness in the media and popular culture. She is also a freelance researcher and author.
Henry’s latest book, Les Filles faciles n’existent pas (Easy Girls Do Not Exist), was published in 2008 and is about female sexual reputation. Henry also co-published a book about the sexism women face in the media titled, Dites-le avec des femmes, le sexisme ordinaire dans les medias (Let the Women Say It: Everyday Sexism in the Media).
In 2006, Henry was put in charge of the report, Les femmes dans les medias (Women in the Media) by the French Ministry of Equal Opportunity.
Henry is a past president of the Association des femmes journalists. She holds post-graduate degrees from the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.
Ammu Joseph
South Asia
Ammu Joseph is a freelance journalist, media analyst and editorial consultant based in India.
A founder and member of the Network of Women in Media, India, she has been a journalist for more than 30 years and has written about and worked extensively on women in the media.
Joseph is a columnist for the India Together Web site and serves as an international editorial board member for Feminist Media Studies. She also blogs at WIMN's Voices, a group blog run by New York-based Women in Media & News. Joseph is the author of Making News: Women in Journalism, published in 2000 and revised in 2005. She also co-authored and edited, with IWMF board member Kalpana Sharma, a book titled, Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues, published in 1994 and revised in 2006.
Joseph received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Madras University, a diploma in social communications media from Sophia College Polytechnic in Mumbai and a bachelor’s degree in public communications from Syracuse University in New York.
Einat Lachover
Israel
Einat Lachover is a professor in the School of Communication at Sapir Academic College in Israel.
Lachover’s doctoral dissertation on women journalists in Israel was based on a survey of 471 Israeli journalists employed at ten newspapers.
She is currently researching the representation of Israeli women in the press during the 1967 war and is also working on a study about how the media covered the local elections in Israel in 2008.
Claudia Mellado Ruiz
Southern Latin America
Claudia Mellado Ruiz is a professor in the social communication department at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile.
Mellado is also the principal researcher of the first National Journalists Survey in her country. The study examines differences in small cities compared with the capital city in terms of the power of journalists in the construction of news.
Mellado was formerly a visiting scholar in the School of Journalism at Indiana University (Bloomington), where she completed an analysis of studies conducted about journalists in 20 Latin American countries.
Jad Melki
Lebanon
Jad Melki, the research director of ICMPA and a faculty member at the Salzburg Academy, is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut.
Previously, he was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University. Melki has been a broadcast and online journalist for over 12 years working with American and Arabic media.
He was part of the Webby award and Press Club award winning Hot Zone team (Yahoo! News), covering the 2006 war in Lebanon. He received his Ph.D. in journalism and media studies from the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Diana Nastasia
Eastern Europe
Diana Nastasia is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication at the University of North Dakota.
She is also the coordinator of a public media project titled Community Connect, for which members of the academic and non-academic communities in North Dakota work together to produce and disseminate their own news.
Nastasia was the associate editor of the Romanian Journal of Communications and Public Relations from 2000-2002. In 1999-2001, she organized a series of symposiums to get young journalists from Romania to meet with members of parliament from Romania and Western European countries.
Nastasia holds a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Bucharest in Romania.
Zadie Neufville
Caribbean
Zadie Neufville works as a communications officer for a regional disaster response agency in Barbados. She is also a correspondent for Inter Press Service.
A former part-time lecturer at the Media and Communications Institute at the University of the West Indies, Neufville is a founding member and chair of the Caribbean Environmental Reporters Network.
Neufville was previously manager of corporate communications and public education for the National Environment and Planning Agency in Jamaica, where she was responsible for planning and implementing community surveys on socio-economic issues.
She holds a master’s degree in journalism studies from Cardiff University in Wales.
Louise North
Oceania
Louise North is a senior lecturer and the deputy head of the Journalism School of Humanities, Communications & Social Sciences at Monash University in Australia. She has written extensively on gender and newsroom culture and has taught in the disciplines of sociology, gender studies, journalism and media studies.
Prior to joining Monash, North lectured on journalism, media and communications at the University of Tasmania. She previously worked as a print journalist for 19 years on regional, suburban and metropolitan newspapers in South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania. She has also worked for the Australian Associated Press. North’s most recent job as a journalist was the regional editor for Messenger Newspapers in Adelaide, Australia, in 2007
North’s new book, titled The Gendered Newsroom: How journalists experience the changing world of media, was published in 2009. It covers the experiences of women in the production of news in the Australian print news media.
Marielba Núñez
Northern Latin America
Marielba Núñez is a professor at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and the Universidad Central, both in Venezuela. She has more than 20 years of experience as a journalist in Venezuela.
Núñez also works for Periodistas por la Igualdad de Género (Journalists for Gender Equality).
She is currently working on a master’s degree in gender, identity and citizenship from the Universidad de Huelva in Spain.
Rosemary Okello-Orlale
Eastern Africa
Rosemary Okello-Orlale is the executive director of African Women and Child Feature Service, a media organization based in Kenya. AWC trains journalists and other media practitioners as well as NGOs in the region in the areas of gender, media and development.
Prior to joining AWC in 1994, Okello-Orale was a writer and researcher for Interlink Rural Information Network, where she focused on developmental journalism and research issues affecting rural communities in Kenya. Okello-Orale was previously a journalist and has also coordinated research and journalism projects and developed media strategies throughout Africa.
Okello-Orale holds an M.A. in new media governance and democracy from Leicester University in England. She also holds a post-graduate diploma in research methodology and population studies from the Research Institute at Nairobi University and a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the London School of Journalism.
Val Oliveira
United Kingdom, Germany
Val Oliveira is a former communications officer and researcher for Liberal International, a world federation of liberal and progressive democratic political parties based in England. At Liberal International, she conducted media monitoring, issued press statements and produced an in-house magazine.
Oliveira, who is originally from Brazil, holds a master’s degree in political communications from Goldsmiths College in England. For her dissertation, she examined the lack of interest in the British political spectrum.
Cai Yiping
Asia
Cai Yiping is the executive director of Isis International, a feminist communications organization based in the Philippines.
Cai is a former associate researcher at the Women’s Studies Institute of China. Her most recent publication, published in 2007, is titled, Find Their Stories: Women in Media.
She was the deputy director of the international and women’s news departments for China Women’s News. Cai has also been a reporter and editor and has conducted training in media and journalism.
She holds a master’s degree in history from Peking University in China.
Mary Lynn Young & Alison Beale
North America (Canada)
Mary Lynn Young is an associate professor at and the director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
The focus of Young’s research and teaching is newsroom sociology with a focus on gender, media representations of gender and crime, media economics and content analysis.
Prior to teaching, Young worked as a journalist for more than a decade at various daily newspapers, including The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun. In 2007, she launched FeministMediaProject.com, a Web site that provides a feminist perspective in media depictions of missing and murdered women.
Young holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Toronto.
Alison Beale is a professor at and associate director of the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is also the co-director of the Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities.
Beale’s principal research and teaching focuses on film and video, communication history and historiography and cultural policy.
Beale served as a Canadian Studies Fellow at Macquarie University in Australia, where she worked on a comparative feminist study of Australian and Canadian cultural policies. A former president of the Canadian Communication Association, she is currently completing a monograph on globalization and cultural policy.
Beale holds a Ph.D. in communication from McGill University in Montreal.