Dr. Sarah Bauerle Bass is an associate professor (SBS) and director of the Risk Communication Laboratory. Her research focuses on health and risk communication and how public health messages are crafted for diverse audiences to enhance decision-making. She has advanced the field of health communication by applying commercial marketing techniques to the development and testing of messages or interventions. Using perceptual mapping and vector modeling methods, Dr. Bass has shown how three-dimensional models can enhance message development and tailor it for specific behavior or attitude barriers. Content can then be applied to interventions using technology (mHealth, the Internet, Web 2.0 applications) and community-based applications. Dr. Bass is also utilizing psycho-marketing methods to assess emotional and physiological response to and processing of health messages through visual, graphic, Web or textual message elements using eye tracking and other bio-physiological measures. She has been funded by NIH (e.g. NCI, NIBIB, NIMH, NIDA), organizations (e.g. American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association), state and city agencies (e.g.  Pennsylvania DOH, PA Commission on Crime and Delinquency, Philadelphia Department of Public Health, AIDS Activities Coordinating Office), and industry (Merck, Gilead, Genentech). Her current projects include studies on PrEP in transgender women and women who inject drugs, decision making around tumor genetic profile testing and clinical trial participation in African American cancer patients, disease management strategies in African American patients with diabetes, COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, airborne infectious disease behavior in young adults with ASD, perceptions of violence in Philadelphia, and medication adherence in women with HIV in the South, among others. Dr. Bass has won the prestigious Great Teacher Award (2012), the highest teaching honor at Temple University, as well as the Lindback Award for excellence in teaching (2007), and the Excellence in Teaching Award (2006) from the College of Public Health. She has also been awarded the Riegelman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Public Health Education by the Association of Schools and Programs in Public Health (ASPPH) and in 2021 was awarded the Everett M. Rogers Award for Excellence in Public Health Communication from the American Public Health Association (APHA).

https://www.temple.edu/about/faculty-staff/sarah-bauerle-bass-sbass