UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication elected two new members to its advisory board: Andy Polansky, former executive chairman and CEO of Weber Shandwick and Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager of artificial intelligence (AI) strategy at the Associated Press.
Polansky and Rinehart bring decades of public communication experience to the advisory board, which assists the Page Center in raising awareness, fundraising, and general guidance and strategy. Members of the board include from different areas of public communication, including academia, corporate communications, journalism and public relations.
Since 2004, the Page Center’s primary function has been funding scholarly research on ethics and responsibility in public communication. Board members play a key role in integrating the needs of the industry with Page Center initiatives and the research efforts of its scholars. This year, the center funded 17 projects chosen from three calls for research proposals on ethics education, collaboration and theory.
“We are lucky to have powerhouse leaders on our advisory board who understand and appreciate the Center’s mission,” said Denise Bortree, director of the Page Center and associate dean for academic affairs at the Bellisario College. “Given their experience and expertise, Aimee and Andy will not only fit in, but bring new perspectives that will prepare us for our next 20 years.”
Andy Polansky
Polansky has more than three decades of client service, mentoring, P&L and M&A experience, which he developed while serving in leadership roles for some of the world's most admired global strategic communications and marketing services consultancies. Polansky is widely recognized as one of the leaders of the global public relations industry, having served as executive chairman of Weber Shandwick until June 2022 after serving as its CEO from 2012-2019. Earlier in his tenure he played a key role in managing the integration of the PR industry's largest merger and in developing innovative practice areas to generate new revenue streams. Polansky also served as chairman and chief executive officer of IPG DXTRA.
Aimee Rinehart
Before joining the AP, Rinehart was the deputy director of First Draft’s New York bureau helping journalists and newsrooms to identify, verify and report on mis- and disinformation through the 2018 and 2020 U.S. election cycles. Rinehart is in the 2024 cohort of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism CUNY as the Tow-Knight Fellow in AI Studies. She co-led the Knight Center for the Americas massive open online course on how newsrooms can use AI. She served on the steering committee for Partnership on AI’s "AI Procurement and Use Guidebook for Newsrooms," and was a council member advising the direction of the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida.
The Page Center is a research center in Penn State’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications that advances ethics and integrity in all forms of public communication. Its primary initiatives include funding research that increases the understanding of integrity in public communication, reinforcing the role of ethics in communications education, and finding connections within the profession.
For two decades, the Page Center has become an international leader in research on ethics and integrity in public communication. Over the past 20 years, the center has funded nearly 300 scholars and awarded nearly $1 million in research funding.
The other members of the Page Center advisory board are Bill Nielsen (chair) former head of communications at Johnson & Johnson; Roger Bolton, president of Page and former senior vice president of communications at Aetna; Sandra Clark, CEO of StoryCorps; Suki Dardarian, editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune; Ellyn Fisher, Bellisario College alumna and senior vice president of marketing and communications of the Ad Council; Aedhmar Hynes, board director of IP Group Plc and Jackson Family Wines; Marie Hardin, dean of the Bellisario College; Bill Margaritis, business consultant and investor; Tom Martin, executive-in-residence at the College of Charleston and former vice president of communications at ITT and FedEx; John Nichols, emeritus professor of communications at the Bellisario College; John Onoda, principal at iQ 360 Inc. and former executive at Charles Schwab, Visa and Levi Strauss; Gary Sheffer, Sandra A. Frazier professor of public relations at Boston University and former vice president of corporate communications and public affairs at General Electric; Charlene Wheeless, CEO at Charlene Wheeless LLC.