Katherine Rafferty

I conduct research in interpersonal health communication with a focus on how patients and families manage and cope with chronic illness and end-of- life care. I am primarily a qualitative scholar, but also use quantitative methods to examine research questions about family health communication needs.

I am an assistant teaching professor at Iowa State University. I teaches several undergraduate communication courses and mentor undergraduate students in their independent research projects. In Fall 2018, I received an internal grant from Iowa State to develop an online health communication course for undergraduate pre-health professionals and other social science majors. Prior to completing my PhD, I worked as a Health Communication Specialist for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.