top of page
66522227_10157444625899269_7820329409503
D120E32E-06CB-4EA0-A50E-7F62F216367D.jpeg

ABOUT ME

I am a tenured Senior Lecturer (corresponds to an Associate Professor in North America) at the Department of Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang, Malaysia. I am concurrently the Director of the UPM-UNICEF C4D, a partnership program with UNICEF Malaysia.

I am an elected Vice President of the World Communication Association (WCA) for Malaysia, a research fellow of the Debiasing and Lay Informatics (DaLI) Lab in the Center for Applied Social Research at the University of Oklahoma (https://sites.google.com/layinformatics.org/dalilab/team), a regular member of the International Communication Association (ICA), and a life member of the Institute of Public Relations Malaysia (IPRM) and the Malaysian Association of Communication Educators (MACE).

I am the recipient of the 2022 Potential Lecturer Award and 2023 Journal Publication Award, given by the Malaysian Association of Communication Educators (MACE) for outstanding achievements in research, publications, teaching, and public service.

I received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Media Studies and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Malaya (UM). In 2010, I was awarded a postgraduate scholarship by the University of Malaya to pursue my graduate studies (fast-track) at UM before getting my Bachelor's degree.

My research primarily focuses on health and risk communication. Specifically, I examine how a specific target group acquires and consumes health-related information from various sources and how different types of health information acquisition behaviors affect health outcomes. My research is guided by health- and communication-related theories to refine communication strategies by developing effective social marketing, behavior change, and education programs about health issues and informing people about ways to enhance health or prevent specific health risks.

I have been invited to be a manuscript reviewer for international and local journals such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), JMIR Infodemiology, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Journal of the Southeast Asia Research Centre for Communication and Humanities (SEARCH), Malaysian Journal of Communication (JK-MJC), and many more. I serve as Section Editor of the Malaysian Journal of Communication, a Scopus-indexed journal, and on the Editorial Boards of the Asian Journal of Applied Communication (AJAC), the Human Communication Journal, and the Journal of Language and Communication.

I have given motivational talks, plenary speeches, and other invited talks on health and risk communication, behavioral change, and social and behavioral change communication at UNICEF, the Ministry of Health, and many more.

Before joining the public sector, I was a language teacher at Tsun Jin High School, where I taught Bahasa Malaysia (the National Language of Malaysia) for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM), or the Malaysian Certificate of Education. After completing PhD studies, I joined New Era University College (NEUC) as a full-time lecturer. After serving at the college for a year, I moved to Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) Sungai Long Campus and became a tenured assistant professor and head of programs (Master’s degrees).

logo illustration

RESEARCH FOCUS

My goal as a health communication scholar is to examine how a particular target group seeks and consumes health-related information from various sources and the effects of these health messages on the target group. I am also interested in discovering why they seek health-related information and participate in specific health behaviors. Based on health and communication theories, I designed my study to improve communication strategies by developing successful social marketing and education programs about a health issue and informing people about ways to improve health or prevent specific health hazards. What I am most interested in is the interrelationship between mass media, communication behaviors, health issues, and public health outcomes, and I see my research as part of a more significant transdisciplinary research effort to transform raw health communication research findings into practical and usable health care/promotion interventions and policies.

My work engages with the study of health information acquisition behavior, specifically investigating how people seek health information from various media and interpersonal channels to help improve their knowledge, attitude, and behavior toward a health topic. Through the post-positivism paradigm, I am motivated by epidemiological research to determine the “behavioral and psychological variables important to the process of prevention and adopting healthier behaviors”, as well as the psychological orientation of interpersonal research and the scientific perspective of medical research.

I anticipate that my primary research trajectory will expand the focus on the Malaysian populations I have studied. There are many potential places my research may lead me and many potential topics I may explore. I can transfer the cultural uniqueness of Malaysians into evidence-based interventions, transforming the Malaysians’ lives for the better. I want to learn whether a self-health management system can be found in Malaysian populations outside the Western continent and, if so, how this process may be altered by different contexts, cultural discourses, and state policies. I want to learn more about how Malaysians engage in different communication behaviors regarding health-related issues. Given the increasing importance of health in the economy, questions such as these have never been more significant for social scientists (including communication scholars).

GET IN TOUCH

Department of Communication

Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication

Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

43400 Serdang 

Selangor, MALAYSIA

+603-9769 8799

Your details were sent successfully!

bottom of page