Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Ph.D., director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), has been honored with a Special Recognition Award from the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research (APTR) for “outstanding service” to the field of prevention and public health.
The APTR, dedicated to health promotion and disease prevention, honored Jamieson “for her national leadership in strengthening the integrity of public discourse, including co-founding FactCheck.org and advancing the science of communication to combat misinformation and improve public understanding of complex health and policy issues.”
Jamieson addressed a plenary session of the group’s Teaching Prevention 2026 conference in Savannah, Ga., on April 21, 2026, on “Preempting or Displacing Misconceptions about Controversial Science.” In her talk, she discussed a “protective knowledge model” using a “mental model approach,” a form of organizing knowledge.
In a 2025 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jamieson and her co-authors showed through a series of experiments that a mental model approach to inform people about aspects of science could undercut the effect of exposure to misconceptions, regardless of whether people were exposed to the models before or after encountering the misinformation. The paper was co-authored by APPC research analysts Laura A. Gibson and Shawn Patterson Jr., and Patrick E. Jamieson, director of APPC’s Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute.
In her talk Jamieson described three mental model approaches. These are: “bypassing” misinformation, displacing it with relevant, consequential information; “foreclosing” misinformation by exposing people to a mental model showing why the claim is implausible; and “contextualizing” misinformation, using a mental model to create a context for accurately interpreting a problematic claim.
She illustrated how these approaches could be used when encountering specific false or misleading claims – in the case of bypassing and foreclosing, countering erroneous claims about how an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine works and, in contextualizing, by showing how and what scientists know about changes in the extent of Arctic sea ice. The research on Arctic sea ice, coauthored by Bruce W. Hardy and Jamieson, was published in PNAS in 2014, with a 2016 follow-up in Environmental Communication.
Jamieson, the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, co-founded FactCheck.org in 2003 at the policy center with journalist Brooks Jackson.
The most recent past honorees of the APTR’s Special Recognition Award are epidemiologist and data scientist Katelyn Jetelina (2023), M.D., M.P.H.; Matthew Boulton (2017), M.D., M.P.H., senior associate dean for global public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine; and pediatrician Woodie Kessel (2011), M.D., M.P.H., assistant surgeon general, USPHS (ret.).
