Dean Susan King Receives the 2015 DeWitt Carter Reddick Award, Maggie-Lee Huckabee Receives Outstanding Alumna Award

AUSTIN, Texas – The Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin will present University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication Dean Susan King with the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award and clinical speech language pathologist Maggie-Lee Huckabee with the Outstanding Alumna Award. King and Huckabee will officially accept their awards at the Moody College of Communication’s convocation on Sunday, April 19, 2015.

The DeWitt Carter Reddick Award was established in 1974 and recognizes excellence in the field of communication. Past Reddick Award recipients include Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers, Ted Turner, and Helen Thomas, among others.

The Moody College established the Outstanding Alumni Award to recognize alumni of the college who have distinguished themselves in their professional and personal lives. Past recipients of the Outstanding Alumnus Award include Wayne Sellers, Lady Bird Johnson, Liz Carpenter and Bruce Hendricks of Walt Disney Productions.

Susan King

King became dean of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication in January 2012. She is the former vice president for external affairs for Carnegie Corporation of New York where she oversaw the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education and all communications.

Prior to Carnegie, King worked in the Clinton administration for five years as the assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor. For more than 25 years she was a broadcast journalist and began her reporting career in Buffalo, N.Y., and worked mostly in Washington, D.C.

She was the White House correspondent for ABC News as well as a well-respected anchor and political reporter in the nation’s capital. As an independent journalist she reported for CNN, CNBC, NPR and ABC Radio News.

King attended Fairfield University in Connecticut where she received her master’s in communications and a bachelor’s degree from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. She is John Thomas Kerr Distinguished Professor at UNC and is currently teaching a course covering presidential campaigns.

Maggie-Lee Huckabee

Maggie-Lee Huckabee has been a clinical speech language pathologist for the past 13 years. She is now the founder and director of the University of Canterbury Rose Centre for Stroke Recovery and Research and associate professor in the Department of Communication Disorders in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Huckabee’s research interests focus on the complexities of behaviorally-driven neural adaptation and biomechanical change leading to swallowing recovery following neurological injury. She completed her clinical training at The University of Texas and received her Ph.D. from the University of Memphis after completing a Fulbright Foundation research fellowship at the General Hospital of Vienna in Austria. There, Huckabee studied under Professor Lueder Deecke, a world leader in exploring premotor brain behavior.

Prior to accepting the academic position in the South Island of New Zealand, Huckabee served on the New Zealand Brain Research Institute and assisted with the opening of the multidisciplinary Rose Stroke Centre.

In Huckabee’s 15-year career, she has co-authored two books, 11 book chapters and published 58 peer-reviewed scientific papers. She is well known as a clinical teacher and has been invited to speak at health systems worldwide to provide clinical training, particularly in rehabilitation practices.

About The University of Texas at Austin Moody College of Communication

One of the nation's foremost institutions for the study of advertising and public relations, communication sciences and disorders, communication studies, journalism and radio-TV-film, The University of Texas at Austin Moody College of Communication is preparing students to thrive in an era of media convergence. Serving more than 4,700 undergraduate and graduate students, the Moody College is nationally recognized for its faculty members, research and student media. For more information about the Moody College, visit moody.utexas.edu.

Contact: Lauren Phillips, 512-471-2182

Lauren Phillips