Heather Noel Fedesco

Heather N. Fedesco, Ph.D. is currently a Mellon Foundation fellow at Colorado College. Her research interests lie at the intersection of interpersonal and health communication. More specifically, she focuses on the ways in which interpersonal communication can influence motivation and behavior change within healthcare, education, and close relationship contexts.

Dr. Fedesco’s work includes an exploration of wellness coaching as a holistic interpersonal health intervention wherein coaches rely on a variety of techniques including supportive listening, motivational interviewing and appreciative inquiry to help clients attain their wellness promoting goals. Other research projects have focused on interactions between healthcare providers and LGBTQ adolescents regarding sexuality communication, as well as ways to increase autonomy, competence and relatedness in the classroom in order to improve student motivation and performance.

Dr. Fedesco has worked at the Center for Instructional Excellence at Purdue University, where she helped execute and assess a campus-wide intervention guided by self-determination theory, which seeks to help faculty redesign their courses by fostering a more student-centered learning environment. She also served as an Associate Course Director for the Fundamentals of Speech Communication at Purdue, one of the nation’s largest undergraduate public speaking courses enrolling over 3,000 undergraduate students per semester. While in this role, she trained over 100 new instructors and personally oversaw over 200 individual course sections. Dr. Fedesco has also taught a variety of classes including interpersonal communication, public speaking, quantitative research methods, and teambuilding and collaboration. She has received several teaching and research honors and awards from Purdue University, the National Communication Association, and the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare.