Dr. Changmin Yan teaches in the advertising and public relations (ADPR) sequence. Dr. Yan’s teaching portfolio includes a wide range of advertising and public relations undergraduate courses, such as introduction to ADPR, strategy development, brands and branding, media planning and strategy, ADPR research, and capstone IMC campaigns, and graduate courses, such as persuasion, health communication, and research methods. He has taught at different universities including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, West Virginia University, Washington State University, the University of Maine, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His industry experience includes media planning and research at Publicis Groupe and digital media strategy at Razorfish, serving clients, such as New York City Department of Health, P&G, McDonald’s, Verizon, LVMH, and Microsoft.
Dr. Yan’s research straddles persuasion and health communication. His research program includes theory-driven research in persuasive health message design and translational research in health promotion. Dr. Yan’s work has advanced our understanding a number of intertwined theory-driven questions concerning emotion, motivation, attitudinal ambivalence and persuasive health messages. Adopting a multistep psychological processing approach, Dr. Yan has made successful attempts to explicate and model such complicated persuasion processes at both theoretical and empirical levels. Findings extracted from such theoretical explications and statistical modeling in turn inform his research concerning the effective design of persuasive messages, especially those concerning health-related issues. Dr. Yan’s scholarly work has been published by several premier peer-reviewed academic journals in communication and psychology such as the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Health Communication, Health Communication, Communication and Society, Applied Environmental Education and Communication, and Personality and Individual Differences. Dr. Yan is a faculty affiliate of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools and serves on the editorial board of Media Psychology.
Dr. Yan actively engages in translational research in which he helps health researchers translate bench research results into formative research and strategic health campaigns. Working on interdisciplinary grants, he often serves as an expert on the effects of marketing on health behaviors and on the development of strategic health promotion campaigns. Dr. Yan has received grants totaling about $1 million from international (German Science Foundation), national (NSF and USDA) and state agencies (DSHS and EPSCoR) and universities. His grant-related work covers a wide range of issues related to health promotion and science communication, such as obesity, nutrition and dietary behaviors, physical activity, cancer survivorship, alcohol and substance abuse, environmental sustainability, and water resource management.
In the last few years, Dr. Yan has aligned his research projects to focus on obesity and health disparities. Working with researchers, extension educators and community partners, he has led efforts to combine persuasion and learning theories with behavioral change models to promote healthy eating and active lifestyle through social media, virtual reality, digital tracking and interactive and mobile technologies. Through his extensive interdisciplinary research collaborations, Dr. Yan has established a strong record of grant-funded research in message tailoring and narrative persuasion in the context of childhood obesity prevention, rural obesity prevention, and health disparities.
Dr. Yan earned his B.A. in Communication (cum laude) from the University of Colorado at Denver, his M.A. in Communication Studies with a graduate certificate in International Development from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.