Melissa Aronczyk is a speaker at our 2024 ClientEarth Summit. She is a Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. She is the co-author, with Maria Espinoza, of ‘A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism’ (Oxford University Press), winner of the 2023 Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award in Political Communication and the 2022 Outstanding Book Award in Public Relations, Innovation, Development and Educational Achievement (PRIDE), both from the National Communication Association. Her research on how PR affects our ability to communicate about climate change has been featured in The Nation, the Financial Times, Rolling Stone, CNBC, The Intercept, Grist, AdWeek, and Yes Magazine. She has also written stories about PR and sustainability for The Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine. At Rutgers, Prof. Aronczyk is a Faculty Associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics and Affiliated Graduate Faculty with the Department of Sociology. She is also a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and a Research Affiliate with the Center on Digital Culture & Society at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an adjunct Research Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Canada. She has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, Yale University, and the University of Helsinki. Melissa holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. From 2023 through 2026, Dr. Aronczyk is the Director of the PhD Program in Communication, Information and Media in Rutgers’ School of Communication & Information.