On June 12, PRSA Richmond awarded Judy VanSlyke Turk, PhD., APR, Fellow PRSA, with the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Award. Each year PRSA Richmond recognizes extraordinary achievement by an individual working in the field of public relations. Thomas Jefferson Award winners exemplify the best in the profession. The program is open to public relations practitioners in the Greater Richmond metropolitan area.
“This award recognizes and celebrates a lifetime of achievement,” said Felicia McLemore, APR, PRSA Richmond’s president. “In Judy VanSlyke Turk’s case, she has achieved enough for three lifetimes! We’re so pleased to be able to honor her in this way, and to count her among our chapter membership.”
Judy VanSlyke Turk is Director of the School of Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Prior to joining VCU in March 2002, she was founding dean of the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates, a position she held for 2½ years. Previously, she was dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina, director of the journalism and mass communications program at Kent State University and a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, Louisiana State University and Syracuse University.
VanSlyke Turk is president-elect of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications and is past president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC), the largest association of journalism faculty and administrators in the United States. She was chair of the teaching standards committee in 1992
VanSlyke Turk is an elected member of the Arthur W. Page Society, an association of senior executives and educators in corporate communication and public relations.
She is 2008 chair of the Educational Affairs Committee of the Public Relations Society of America and a past chair of its College of Fellows. She also is a member of the Commission on Public Relations Education, a collaborative venture among PRSA and several other academic and professional associations in public relations.
VanSlyke Turk, who worked professionally for The Associated Press and in university and corporate public relations before beginning her academic career, was named Outstanding Public Relations Educator in 1992 by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). In 2005 she was awarded the Pathfinder Award by the Institute for Public Relations in recognition of her research and publications in the field of public relations.
She is associate editor of Journalism Studies, an international refereed journal. She also is a member of the editorial advisory board for Journal of Public Relations Research, and Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly.
VanSlyke Turk is co-author of This is PR: The Realities of Public Relations (Wadsworth Publishing, now in its 9th edition) and co-editor of a collection of international public relations case studies developed as a project of the Public Relations Division of AEJMC and published by the Institute for Public Relations.
She has consulted and lectured on public relations and journalism/mass communications curriculum issues in Eastern Europe, the Newly Independent States, the Baltics, Russia, the Middle East and Asia.
Dr. VanSlyke Turk's friends congratulate her in a video tribute
View the tribute video in which just a few of Dr. VanSlyke Turk's friends congratulate her on this lifetime achievement award.
Tribute Video- Part I
Tribute Video- Part II
