Bissell teaches a biennial class where students visit another country and produce a magazine called Alpine Living and serves as the University’s director of undergraduate research, director of the Emerging Scholars Program, the college’s associate dean for research amd director of the Institution for Communication and Information Research, while working with graduate students in the University of Alabama Health Communication Research Lab. Bissell finds time to balance her research, teaching and personal life each day. She even teaches a fitness class at the Rec center on campus.
“I don’t think she sleeps,” said Jonathan Norris, a senior majoring in visual journalism and one of the students in her Alpine Living class.
Bissell said she started in photo journalism at the University of Florida, where she worked up to three jobs at a time to put herself through school. She was hired by a wire service in Gainesville and gained experience through unpaid internships as well.
Bissell then took a job in Washington, D.C. She said she went from living in a hotel, to her car, to living with people she found through church connections. After a month, Bissell said she was offered a job teaching community college courses. What she didn’t know was that the remedial courses were for people on jail release, she said. Bissell said she taught her students how to write a sentence, a paragraph and then an essay. Sometimes the things they wrote were disturbing, but she said she found a real love for teaching at the college level.
“That job was humbling, but so powerful because many of them wanted to be there,” she said. “They wanted to turn their life around.”
Despite a background in sports photography at Florida, Bissell said the men she worked with gave her a hard time for wanting to cover professional football. They gave her a chance to prove herself and decided she was good enough, though she said it was still a struggle each time she asked to cover a different sport.
“It was just this assumption that, because I was female I didn’t know anything about football and didn’t have any business on the sidelines,” she said. “If you looked at my portfolio, 75 percent of it is sports because that’s what I did in Florida.”
Bissell said she discovered her love for research in graduate school. At a conference in San Francisco, she said she heard a lecture that made her think about media’s role in self-image and how that could affect her young daughter. She decided to shift the focus of her research in a new direction.
Bissell said she thought she would find body image improved with age, but while she surveyed 21- to 80-year-old women, she found a negative disposition was at the same level across the board. She said it was disheartening to learn that half the population was dissatisfied with their looks and suffered from a disconnect in self-perception.
The study turned to children to find when and where the issue starts. She said she discovered girls had body issues as young as second grade, which suggested environmental factors, not only an issue with the media.
“The loathing or the hate for being overweight was as strong as the desire to be thin,” Bissell said.
She said she wanted to find out why there is a stigma against obesity in a society where 25 percent or more of children in any state are overweight or obese. Some blamed media, technology or fast food, but Bissell said the multifaceted issue sometimes stems from self-confidence.
Bissell’s research turned to finding a way to help children learn how to eat healthier and to show them that being active can be fun. She said she is working with a computer-based honors student to create an app called Track My Plate, allowing children to click on all the foods they eat in a day. The virtual plate shows them how healthy or unhealthy their choices are. The soft launch is tentatively slated for the end of the semester, with a more widespread start in August. The app will be free for schools and sold in the iTunes store.
Despite her advancements in research, Bissell said she believes her first responsibility at Alabama is to be a professor.
“She is very challenging as a professor and she really strives to pull the best out of her students,” Norris said. “She’s slightly intimidating in the beginning, but by the third week you feel very comfortable.”
Bissell said she strives to connect with graduate students the way professors connected with her while she was working on her degree. Collin Curry, a first-year graduate student, described her as a professional who is brilliant and hard working.
“She did a lot for me, because when I applied for Alpine Living I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Curry said. “She got me on the right track and helped me find out that I wanted to be a travel writer.”
It was announced Tuesday that Bissell was selected as the 2015 recipient of the President’s Faculty Research Award for the College Communication and Information Sciences.
Outside of her professional life, Bissell said she is incredibly proud of her two smart, soccer-playing daughters. One is a freshman in college and the other is 13. She said she feels fortunate to have been able to take them on many of her abroad excursions – the culture, language and history they have encountered have been invaluable to their lives, she said.
