Professor Olivia Cohen is joining the Temple Honors Community from Klein College of Media and Communications department of Communications and Social Influence. An alumna of Cleveland State University and Penn State, Cohen came to Temple in 2022, where she has spent three years as an assistant professor in the CSI department. Stemming from her upbringing in Maine, one of the epicenters of the opioid crisis in the US, much of her research has concentrated on health messaging and the communication of public health campaigns. In recent years, she has developed an interest in public skepticism of scientific research, and seeks to further pursue this during her time working with Temple Honors.  

Why Temple Honors?  

Since arriving at Temple, Cohen has been inspired by the attitude Honors students take to learning, which she cites as influencing her to get more involved both within the University and in her personal life. A Fishtown resident, Cohen points to the engagement that Temple students exhibit, both in their studies and in the North Philly community, as being a motivator for her getting more involved with her local community; she currently serves on the Fishtown Neighbors Association, aiming to embody the deep tradition of community involvement at Temple Honors. Temple Honors students drive Cohen in the classroom as well. She describes, "by engaging with [Honors] students, by seeing how passionate and actively interested they are in not just learning material but diving deeper into it, having deeper discussions, engaging in more active applications, I found those teaching experiences to be really meaningful.” 

Cohen also points to the interdisciplinary emphasis of Temple Honors as a major factor in her decision to apply to the Honors Affiliated Faculty program. An opponent of what she calls “siloed” information (information only accessible to a certain group), Cohen feels that it’s all to easy in a university setting to get “caught in” the trap of just sticking within your major or college, to the potential detriment of your overall learning experience. Cohen believes that interdisciplinary studies possess the ability to transform thinking, expand horizons, and lead to creative solutions. “When you think about what other tools, what other perspectives could [one] learn from, could I work with to solve issues,” Cohen said, “I think that’s what ultimately can be a huge creator of positive change in a lot of spaces”. 

Goals And Plans for Temple Honors 

Professor Cohen has several goals for her time at Temple Honors, the first of which being to increase the number of course offerings for Honors students in her home college, Klein. Additionally, she aims to bring an element of her work with the Fishtown Neighborhood Association to Temple Honors, by offering a class dedicated to the psychology of community beautification, a project she has been heavily involved with in her own area. Designated as a community-based learned course, KLN 4900: Green Spaces and the Third Place will run for the first time in Spring 2026. The course aims to examine the human need for dedicated outdoor spaces to socialise, the psychology behind that need, and the communication and public policy implications of that need. Building off of Temple’s reputation as the “University of Philadelphia,” students would identify locales in the city that may benefit from such a space and undergo the full process of conducting research and writing policy proposals to city legislature in pursuit of producing a tangible result. Embodying Cohen’s love of interdisciplinary studies, the course combines elements of (among other things) Urban Studies, Communication and Social Influence, Psychology, Public Policy, and Environmental Sciences. 

During Fall 2025, you can visit her during Honors Affiliated Faculty Office Hours on Fridays from 2-4pm in Tuttleman 204.