David Voelker teaches courses in communication theory and research methods.
In the 2014-15 school year, he will be teaching:

Comm 122/222: Content Analysis: Studying Communication Artifacts

Voelker is also a consultant with over twenty years experience conducting quantitative and qualitative research in a variety of areas in the private and public sectors, including news and entertainment media, consumer marketing, and public health campaigns.  

His areas of interest include cognitive processing of media, the misuse of social science research in applied settings, and the philosophy of science.  In the 1970s he conducted some of the earliest research on interrelationships between preferences in popular music, anticipating music recommendation websites.  He is currently applying cognitive science to the objectivity-subjectivity problem, examining how mental biases and capacity limitations carve out a space in which our false beliefs are protected from contradiction by the outside world.  In his model, the cause-and-effect relationships of objective reality create a feedback loop that keeps mental representations (beliefs) from straying too far from their objective referents, analogous to the process by which stock market bubbles are corrected. 

Voelker received his Ph.D. in communication from Stanford in 1994.  He received his B.A. from Kent State University and his masters from Cleveland State University.  He is co-author of a top selling (over 150,000 copies) statistics study guide.

An avid adventure traveler, his outdoor accomplishments include shark cage diving in South Africa, mountain paragliding in New Zealand and spelunking in Kentucky, where he discovered a new branch of a cave.