UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Seventy-three Penn Staters have given an international communications conference a decidedly blue-and-white tint this week, Aug. 6-9, in Washington, D.C.

Penn State's contingent at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is comprised of 38 alumni, 18 graduate students and 17 faculty researchers, mostly from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.

The group includes the newly installed AEJMC president, Marie Hardin, professor and dean of the Bellisario College, as well as the recipient of AEJMC's prestigious Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence, Distinguished Professor S. Shyam Sundar.

In addition, Penn State's group is responsible for nine award-winning papers at the three-day conference, which continues through Thursday.

AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. Founded in 1912 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.

AEJMC’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to encourage the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding.