Cammi Clark, Ph.D., senior director of Research Communications for the office of University Relations and Public Affairs, and adjunct professor with the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University.
She leads a team of communication professionals responsible for discovering and sharing with the world the stories behind the research, scholarship and creative activity happening across the university. The team tells those stories through a variety of platforms from print and digital magazines to daily websites, through videos, social media, advertisements, and more.
After earning an undergraduate degree in communications from Brockport University in New York, her career journey began as a journalist for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. It was there where she cut her teeth in storytelling, bringing words to life of the people, places and things around her.
After more than a dozen years as a newspaper journalist, and briefly dipping her toe into a corporate advertising agency, she decided to build a specialty niche magazine – a content-driven, women’s lifestyle magazine where she could continue to tell stories through a platform that was a voice where sometimes there was none.
Shortly after, she was invited to expand those skills at a larger, more national publication headquartered in Florida. The move from a snowy New York landscape to a sunny Florida beach view seemed like the right choice.
Simultaneously, she spent the last decade doing research. She earned two master’s degrees, the first in narrative medicine and the second in leadership and change, as well as a doctorate degree in leadership and change, all from Antioch University. Her dissertation research focused on the psychological implications of living with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. The published study is a compilation of genetic research and telling the stories of people trying to outrun their almost certain probability of getting a cancer that may never come.
It was that blended world – a world between traditional research and creatively telling stories – that led her to FAU, where she uses her experience, expertise and education to help the world see the story behind the research.