Waterhouse Family Institute Grant for Zhan and Gans
UTA Communication faculty members awarded competitive national research grant
Dr. Monica Zhan and Dr. Roger Gans, Associate Professors of Communication at The University of Texas at Arlington, have been awarded a $9,600 research grant from the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society at Villanova University.
The award was one of only ten made in the 2026-27 cycle, selected from the largest applicant pool in the program’s history through anonymous peer review. The Institute reported an acceptance rate of 9 percent.
“Our project examines how people in organizations respond to messages that may have been drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence,” said Dr. Zhan, who is the Principal Investigator in the research project. “AI tools are already in wide use inside organizations, but we know very little about how audiences receive messages once they know a machine helped write them. This funding lets us test that directly rather than speculate.”
“We are honored to have our work recognized and supported by the Waterhouse Foundation,” said Gans, who has collaborated with Zhan on a number of research projects in the field of organizational communication. Zhan’s research program spans public relations and organizational communication. Gans’s work focuses on organizational and health communication. Their most recent work has included a grant-funded study of messaging for organizational policy advocacy and inoculation strategies in organizational communication, which appeared in the International Journal of Business Communication.
Their current study addresses a question with immediate practical stakes as organizations increasingly adopt AI writing tools for internal communication: whether readers evaluate a message differently once they know a machine helped produce it, and what that means for employees who use these tools to raise concerns or propose changes at work.
The two-study experimental design tests competing predictions from the communication literature: whether AI assistance strengthens a message’s reception or undercuts its credibility.
About the Waterhouse Family Institute
The Waterhouse Family Institute of Villanova University supports scholarship examining communication’s role in building a more just and humane society. Its research grant program funds work across the discipline, with awards made to scholars at institutions nationwide.