Sandra Petronio

Adjunct Professor

E-mail
Phone: 317-274-8655
Office: 355 Lansing St.
AO 101
Indianapolis, IN 46202

Other Titles

Professor, Department of Communication Studies at IUPUI
Core Faculty, IU Center for Bioethics, School of Medicine
Adjunct faculty, IU School of Nursing

Biography

Sandra Petronio is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis and Core Faculty in the Indiana University Center for Bioethics in the School of Medicine. She is also an adjunct faculty in the IU School of Nursing and the IU School of Informatics.

Originally from New York, Professor Petronio completed her B.A. in interdisciplinary social science from The State University of New York at Stony Brook. She received her M.A. in social psychology and a Ph.D. in communication from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Minnesota. For 14 years, she was a faculty member at Arizona State University in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication before going to Department of Communication and School of Medicine at Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. in 2000. At Arizona State University, Professor Petronio was the director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in communication and at Wayne State University; she served as director of the Speech Communication Area in the Department of Communication.

Professor Petronio’s area of research is in privacy, disclosure, and confidentiality. During the last 25 years, she has developed the “Communication Privacy Management” theory, recently completing a book published by State University of New York Press entitled, “Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure” on this theory. This book has won the Gerald R. Miller Award from the National Communication Association in 2003 and the 2004 IARR book award from the International Association of Relationship Research. She has expertise in health communication, interpersonal relations, and family communication. Professor Petronio has published five books, numerous articles in scholarly journals and books, served as a journal editor for the Western Journal of Communication as well as serving as editor for several special issues of Communication Research and the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Currently she just published a book with LEA press on HIV/AIDS and disclosure with co-authors, Kathryn Greene, Val Derlega, and Gust Yep.

Professor Petronio has frequently presented scholarly papers at national, international, and regional conventions. She commences her post as the new president of the International Association of Relationship Research next July and is a past president of the Western States Communication Association. Most recently, she has been honored with the Bernard J. Brommel Family Communication Award for outstanding scholarship and distinguished service in family communication from the National Communication Association. In addition, in 2003 she was the first recipient of the Bernard Brock Research Award bestowed by Wayne State University’s Department of Communication. In 2002, Professor Petronio and her colleagues were recognized for their presentation on informal health care advocates by the European Association for Communication in Healthcare in Warwick, England.

Professor Petronio has extensive teaching experience at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In addition, she has mentored numerous doctoral and master’s advisees during her 25 years as a faculty member. She has served on many academic committees and she is committed to building a sense of community.

One of Professor Petronio’s missions is to help faculty learn how to translate their scholarship into practice. Though knowledge is valuable in its own right, academic research is most useful when it can be converted into useable assets in the everyday world. Consequently, Professor Petronio has presented papers, conducted workshops, written popular articles on her research, and endeavored to persuade colleagues to embrace the practice of translating scholarship.