Sheila Murphy is a full professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where she researches how individual-level factors (e.g., education, age, gender), interpersonal factors (e.g., social networks), community-level factors (e.g., healthcare availability), and cultural-level factors (e.g., social norms and beliefs) impact decision-making.

For the past 20 years, Murphy has focused on the role of narrative or storytelling in shaping the public’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.  Most recently, she and her colleagues have conducted experimental research on factors such as identification with fictional characters and being “transported into” a story that can overcome objections to potentially threatening health information (e.g., e-cigarette risk).  

During the recent COVID pandemic, Murphy and her colleagues developed three short narratives to dispel common vaccine myths and increase adult and child vaccination nationwide:

‘Team Player’ shows how, as a soccer game begins, parents and kids deal with resistance to COVID vaccinations with humor and empathy to overcome misinformation and myths.

‘Of Reasons and Rumors’ follows a tight-knit Latino family in East LA who disagree about the importance and safety of COVID vaccination. Watch in English here and Spanish here. 

‘Happy Birthday, Granny’ revolves around an African-American family in South LA celebrating their grandmother’s birthday when an argument leads to an honest discussion about the truth about the development and safety of the COVID vaccine.  

Domestically, Murphy has also worked with scriptwriters of popular television shows and evaluated the impact of numerous health storylines on popular television (including Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, ER, Law & Order, Chicago Med, East Los High and several Spanish language telenovelas on Telemundo and Univision) with Hollywood, Health and Society (HH&S) which is also housed at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC.

Internationally, Murphy has worked on a variety of award-winning Entertainment Education (EE) projects in which health information was embedded into popular programming for the express purpose of promoting a particular health outcome, such as condom normalization in India, anti-sex trafficking in Indonesia, and increasing cervical cancer prevention worldwide.

Murphy has been received numerous awards including the Gamechanger Award “for research that created a paradigm shift in public health”, the Everett Rogers Award for “outstanding contribution to advancing the study and/or practice of public health communication” by the American Public Health Association and was elected a Fellow of the International Communication Association in recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication.

Awards and honors

Gamechanger Award (2023)
Elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (2018)
Everett M. Rogers Award (2015)
Winner of the National Institutes of Health Common Fund 10-Year Commemoration Video Contest (2014)
Top Translational Research Award (2013)