Ashley P. Duggan (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara 2003) is a Professor in the Communication department at Boston College where she teaches Health Communication, Research Methods, Relational Communication, and Nonverbal Communication. Her research is grounded in social science and addresses the intersections of nonverbal and verbal communication processes, health, and relationships. She holds additional appointments as adjunct faculty in Public Health and Community Medicine and in Family Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, where her connections allow for interdisciplinary research involving large-scale analysis the development of reflective capacity in medicine, the ways reflective practice connects to communication processes in provider/patient interactions, and the ways communication predictors of health disparities vary across patient populations.
Dr. Duggan recently published four articles on the role of reflective practice and Communication in family medicine with an interdisciplinary team of senior investigators across multiple disciplines. She and her team had physicians keep a year of journals to write about their experiences with patients. Publications indicate that reflective writing shapes development of the physician more broadly than clinical competence and also indicates communication behavior and health outcomes for physicians and patients.
