Luc Beauregard Doctoral Fellowship awarded to Azadeh Babaghaderi
From left to right: Jordan LeBel, Doris Juergens, Joshua Murphy, Azadeh Babaghaderi, Denis Couture, executive vice-president, public and international affairs at Ivanhoe-Cambridge, Shirley Roburn, Sam Kolahgar, PhD candidate at JMSB, Claude Breton, assistant vice-president, Public Affairs at National Bank of Canada, Anne Beaudry, associate professor, Department of Supply Chain Management and Business Technology at JMSB.
On May 29, the Luc Beauregard Centre for Excellence in Communications Research at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business (JMSB) held a special event to award a fellowship and a scholarship as well as to discuss recent best practices in communications and public relations.
The Centre was established in 2012 to pay tribute to Luc Beauregard (1941-2013), the pioneer in strategic communications and founding president of RES PUBLICA. The Centre’s mission is to advance the strategic role of public relations at the highest levels of organizational management and leadership by supporting and promoting applied and innovative research and establishing best practices that can assist and inspire today’s and tomorrow’s senior professionals in all types of organizations.
The Centre awarded a doctoral fellowship to Azadeh Babaghaderi, doctoral candidate at the John Molson School of Business. The research project submitted by Babaghaderi, supervised by Harjeet Bhabra, associate dean research at the John Molson School of Business, focuses on the study of the relationship between the characteristics of boards of directors, the quality of communication and an organization’s value. Each year, the Luc Beauregard Centre provides up to two fellowships in strategic communication, each with a value of $17,500.
The Centre also welcomed Joshua Murphy, undergraduate student and winner of the Kenneth R. Cavanagh Memorial Award. This award was created in 2008 by NATIONAL Public Relations to pay tribute to the former director of the Montreal office’s Investor Relations practice, Ken Cavanagh, who believed deeply in the power of words; his unmatched communication skills allowed him to build a distinguished career. The award is presented annually to the student at the John Molson School of Business with the highest average in the Corporate Communication course.
Members of the Centre’s advisory board, including Doris Juergens, partner and national vice-president, strategy, NATIONAL Public Relations, as well as the 2014 fellows, Shirley Roburn (Communication Studies) and Mohammad Reza Habibi (Marketing), were invited to the meeting. Roburn is studying the communication of stories and narratives on climate change in northwestern Canada and Alaska. Habibi is exploring the reasons that lead consumers to stop interacting with organizations through social media. The meeting was thus an opportunity for participants to share best practices and discuss the state of research in communications and public relations.
This event was yet another example of the high value that the RES PUBLICA and its founding chairman have always placed on communications research and the advancement of the public relations profession in Canada.