Temple Northup (’99) is the Director of the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston. He is also the Co-Director of the Gulf Coast Food Project—an interdisciplinary project that promotes the study of food in the Texas Gulf Coast region—for which he oversees the production of the documentary films and multimedia stories. Temple’s research broadly seeks to understand how the media can influence our attitudes and behaviors and has been published in a wide array of respected journals, including Media Psychology and Applied Cognitive Psychology. Popular with the media, he is a regular guest on Houston Matters and his research has been featured everywhere from the Los Angeles Times to USA Today. Temple has also made an in-studio appearance in New York City as a guest on the nationally televised Fox & Friends. Before coming to UH, Temple worked in Los Angeles as a sitcom writer and was part of over 180 episodes of primetime television.