Dr. Kahlor's undergraduate teaching in research and persuasive psychology has been recognized with a Moody College Teaching Excellence Award, a University of Texas System Regents Outstanding Teaching Award, The William David Blunk Memorial Professorship, a Services for Students with Disabilities Clock Award, the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, and a Provost's Teaching Fellowship.
Dr. Kahlor is Editor of the journal Science Communication and an international expert in health and environmental risk communication with an emphasis on information seeking and avoiding. She has explored information behaviors in contexts ranging from cancer to nanotechnology to carbon capture and storage and has published more than 70 peer-reviewed research articles, book chapters and white papers, and co-edited two books. A secondary interest is in cultural and racial norms related to health behaviors and message processing. Her work has appeared in myriad journals including Health Communication, Human Communication Research, Science Communication, Mass Communication and Society, Communication Theory, Environment and Behavior, and Indoor and Built Environment.
She is a regular contributor to working groups at the National Academies of Science and Medicine and has served on grant review panels at the National Science Foundation. In 2021, Dr. Kahlor was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) "For distinguished scholarship, teaching, and service in health and environmental risk communication and related areas, especially regarding nanotechnology."
Dr. Kahlor also has a robust funding portfolio; she is co-principal investigator on a $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, and has received additional funds from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ExxonMobil, Lasker Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Templeton Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin, and the oil and gas industry to fund her work in science communication.
Prior to academia, she worked in journalism, in corporate communications, as a freelance writer, and as communication officer for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation national program office dedicated to substance abuse treatment.
She currently lives in central Austin with her husband, 5 kids, 2 dogs, 4 cats, 1 bunny, 1 chickens and 0 fish (R.I.P. fishy).
