Daniel Catalán

Daniel Catalan is a health communication scholar with nearly 20 years of field and research experience. He stands out for his extensive international background in public health organizations and strong track record of high impact publications. Accredited as a full professor (catedrático de universidad) by ANECA, holds the distinguished Spanish I3 certification of excellence in international research. He has led and been part of research national and international projects and is the director of MEDIALAB, the UC3M research group “Analytics, media and public engagement: communication, journalism and technology laboratory”. According to GS, his scientific contributions have received more than 2000 citations (h-index = 25) and has published more than 70 papers in JCR or SJR indexed journals.

Daniel’s research interests focus on a) effects of media uses on public health, b) journalistic coverage of health topics with special interest in vaccines, c) health-related mis/disinformation and fake-news in the digital media, d) public understanding of health/science-related risks, and e) communication experiences of patients using digital health technologies with special interest in pacemakers. His latest publications in high impact factor journals explore media-related phenomena for public communication of vaccines including coverage analysis in different countries deepening in the anti-vaccine lobby and uncertainties or disbeliefs especially in connection with framing, sourcing and agenda-setting theories. The latest paper focuses on the anti-vaccine discourse in Twitter through an exploratory audit of negative tweets about vaccines and their posters.   His latest book “Health communication and promotion in the digital era”, coedited with other health communication scholars (Terrón & Peñafiel), aimed to increase research and policy awareness of this important field. Lately, his scientific contributions in relation to COVID-19 have been acknowledged by World Health Organization and included in the research selection “Global literature on coronavirus disease”.