EDITORIAL BOARD

Rick Williams Lane Community College

Rick Williams is an award-winning scholar in visual communication research and an internationally recognized documentary photographer. Currently Chair of the Division of the Arts at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, he previously taught visual and media studies and photography at the University of Texas and the University of Oregon. His research and photographic work are widely published in scholarly journals and books and his photographs are part of the permanent collections of major museums and university archives.

Through his research and teaching of visual and media studies, Mr. Williams has developed and published theories of visual communication that explore and advance understanding of the cognitive aspects of visualization and the effects of media imagery on human behavior and culture. In current research he integrates his visual theories with applications of integrated arts learning to help develop and implement a new pedagogical model that he believes will help enhance learning, creativity, intelligence and productivity in education and life skills. His work has brought him note as an author, lecturer, and teacher. In 2000 he published a twenty-year photographic/ethnographic study of Texas culture, Working Hands, and his most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Julianne H. Newton, Visual Communication: Integrating Media, Art, and Science introduces his newest research.

Professor Williams won the National Communication Association's Visual Communication Research Award of Excellence in 2002 for his development of theories and applications to visual learning. He presented the keynote address Theorizing Visual Intelligence: Practices, Development, and Methodologies for Visual Communication at the Visual Communications: Rhetorics and Technologies Conference at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2001. In 2002 he was an invited scholar of the International SIGGRAPH Visualization and Science Task Force and a principal author of the SIGGRAPH Position Paper Visual Learning in Science and Technology. In 2004-2005 he served on the National Science Foundation's Visualization Task Force of the Transportation Research Board to develop integrated arts processes and visualization techniques to enhance performance in engineering curricula and practice.

Mr. Williams' current research initiative explores how visual and artistic techniques facilitate enhanced cognitive creativity, problem solving and decision-making, and academic and professional performance across disciplines from art to business to science. He advocates a pedagogical model that recognizes integrated arts learning as the foundation of learning and as a core component of curricula that serve ecologically sound interdisciplinary and multiple intelligence initiatives.

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