Matthew Matsaganis

Matthew Matsaganis studies how communities, organizations, and institutions build the communication infrastructure that supports health, equity, and resilience—and what happens when they fail to. His work spans U.S. and European settings and asks how the systems people depend on to share information, coordinate care, and respond to crises get built (or break down) in the lived experience of patients, residents, and grassroots organizations. Across primary care clinics in New Jersey, immigrant micro-businesses in U.S. cities, solidarity outpatient clinics in Greece, and municipal governments responding to overlapping economic and pandemic crises, his research traces a common thread: communication is not the surface of health and civic life but its constitutive process.

 

Matsaganis is co-director of Rutgers’ IAPP-Greece initiative, advancing health communication research and education in Greece and the U.S. through partnerships and study abroad. He co-led a Rutgers Global Health Institute study on the competencies and training needs of global health communication professionals. That work anchors a 2026 special issue of the Journal of Health Communication (“From Competencies to Capacity”), which he is co-editing. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Health Communication and the European Journal of Health Communication.

 

He co-authored and co-edited four books, including "Understanding Ethnic Media" (2011) and "Ethnic Media in the Digital Age" (2019). His work has appeared in Health Communication (recipient of a 2025 National Communication Association Top Paper Award), the Journal of Applied Communication Research, the Journal of Health Communication, and the International Journal of Communication, among others. Matsaganis was a Fulbright Scholar in Athens (2018).