Erika Franklin Fowler directs the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), which tracks and analyzes political advertising in real-time and local television news across the country. She specializes in large-scale analyses of political and health-related communication—campaign advertising and local media, in particular—and her research analyzing the content and effect of messaging has been published in top journals in political science and communication along with law/policy, public health and medical journals. Her work with WMP has also been cited extensively in the nation’s leading media outlets. She is co-author of Political Advertising in the United States and has led WMP's expansion into computational and multimodal analyses of media including digital advertising. Fowler is also a member of the Collaborative on Media & Messaging for Health and Social Policy and serves on the ABC News Election Night Decision Desk. She also has professional experience running surveys and focus groups to assess public opinion. At Wesleyan, Fowler teaches courses in American politics, media and politics, public opinion, and empirical methods along with lab classes engaged in quantitative and computational research with the Wesleyan Media Project. She won Wesleyan's Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2019.