Brett Sherrick

Get to Know Assistant Professor Brett Sherrick

My primary research areas are video games, positive media psychology, and media industries and my primary teaching interests are video games, mass communication, and research methods. I typically work with graduate students who are interested in games, game cultures, and mass communication.

I want graduate students to be successful people - not just successful graduate students. As an advisor, I encourage students to clearly define the purpose of their graduate education and then help them identify ways to make the best use of their graduate work to achieve their goals. I hope to help graduate students develop the skills, connections, and perspectives that they need to be successful - in either academic or industry fields. I like to involve students in my work but also hope to help them develop their own.

Education

PhD, The Pennsylvania State University
MA, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
BA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

Dr. Brett Sherrick is an assistant professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication. Prior to joining Purdue’s faculty, Dr. Sherrick was an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. He completed his Ph.D. in mass communications at Penn State University. Before beginning his career in academia, he worked as a journalist in North Carolina.

Dr. Sherrick’s research and teaching focus on mass communication and media, particularly new media and video games. Specifically, he looks at user engagement with media as an outcome of successful media and as a precursor to user benefits from media use, such as improved outcomes from mediated health campaigns. He employs quantitative social science to research how people can potentially benefit from their media use and how mass communicators can optimize those benefits for media users.

His research has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, new media & society, and Computers in Human Behavior, among others. His dissertation on the roles of flow and narrative engagement in a persuasive health game won the Mass Communication and Society Division Top Dissertation Award in 2016 at the annual conference for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The same organization awarded him with the Promising Professor Award in 2017.

Interests