Hello and Welcome! I’m Patrice Buzzanell, past president of ICA. Currently I’m a faculty member at the University of South Florida and a research scientist in the school of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University where I was a distinguished university professor. Today, I’m delighted to share more about the podcast, Communicating for Impact, a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. In this episode I will share the inspiration, /goals, and future directions of this series of podcast episodes. In Communicating for Impact, I look to provide guidance for handling communication problems in everyday life. This means that I seek to focus attention on the application of communication scholarship, particularly questions about what can be done with communication theory and research findings that can affect how we think about, do, feel about, and create knowledge and strategies concerning challenges we face. Some of these challenges may relate to specific contexts like people who have suffered trauma, and other challenges may center around what to do and say when confronted with conversational and identity dilemmas. I look to engage in conversations with other scholars about evidence-based interventions —with “evidence” broadly conceptualized to encompass the range of possibilities in our discipline. These interventions can help solve individual ordinary problems to improve our own and others’ daily lives. They also may consider larger-scale questions that can be interrogated to draw useful implications. By highlighting research-inspired strategies, we can collectively uncover hidden gems of tried-and-true practices as well as emerging ideas to help better our lives. This podcast theme is close to my heart, both professionally and personally, as I am always seeking to find and use practical applications of communication in my work, my family life, and my relationships with friends and colleagues near and far. Sometimes, I am intrigued by finding out that something I was doing that just seemed like common sense to me had been studied already and in directions I hadn’t yet anticipated or considered based on differences in time, place, and people. As my research coalesces around career, work-life policy, resilience, gender within intersectional lenses, and human-centered engineering design in micr through macro contexts, I am interested in probing how communication scholarship is applied, often ironically and always creatively, in people’s everyday lives. As I continue in my academic career and explore the material and discursive intricacies of communication, I continuously find myself interested not only in identifying research-proven strategies for handling common issues and problems in situ, but also drawn to other scholars whose work asks these questions as well. This curiosity has led me here, today, to create the Communicating for Impact podcast series. In the episodes to follow, you can expect future guests to explore the multifaceted and material interplays of practical communication applications. You might wonder how we seek to do this? That’s a good question! As I’ve already mentioned, I’d like to highlight strategies that differ depending on specific communication contexts like health, educational, political, organizational, technology, feminist, and other contexts. And on people in terms of how race, gender, socioeconomic status, geographic and social locations, sexual identities, and so forth influence people’s movements in this world. I look to provide practical applications of communication, I am attentive to my own privileged positionalities as a white, cis-gender researcher who operates primarily in Western contexts. I recognize that there are often forgotten stakeholders, unheard voices, and those who are seen as outside heteronormative, Western, and white standards who are left out of the conversation. This is not only happening across the globe and in our backyards, but also in our own field of Communication. As a result, I look to pay specific attention to scholars whose work may be underrepresented in our discipline. Through this, I hope listeners --as well as myself-- can learn more about communicative strategies that can help aid people from all around the world with different histories, stories, identities, and knowledges. Thank you for listening to this introductory episode of Communicating for Impact. Stay tuned for more episodes that we hope will offer a series of adventures to research and practical strategies of communication. Again, welcome to Communicating for Impact!!