Allison Noyes

Dr. Allison Noyes is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where she currently serves as Interim Department Chair and Director of the Public Relations Minor. She received her B.A. in Politics from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Dr. Noyes is an organizational communication scholar whose research examines how power relationships are negotiated in interprofessional healthcare settings, the constitutive role of communication in organizational life, and the ways institutional discourse shapes—and is shaped by—the people inside organizations. Her most-cited work, "Navigating the Hierarchy: Communicating Power Relationships in Collaborative Health Care Groups" (Management Communication Quarterly, 2022), investigates how clinicians communicate across professional hierarchies in team-based care, a question with direct implications for patient outcomes and organizational design. A 2025 book chapter extends this work theoretically; the volume in which it appears received the Distinguished Edited Book Award from the Applied Communication Division of the National Communication Association.

Three research projects currently underway include: a field study of how palliative care providers strategically frame their clinical identity and practice to gain institutional acceptance, drawing on interviews at a Southern California medical center; a sociomaterial analysis of legacy ICT use and power hierarchies in interprofessional hospital teams; and an institutional-level discourse analysis of hierarchy negotiation across healthcare professionals in online communities (planned sabbatical project, spring 2027).

Before joining LMU, Dr. Noyes worked as an embedded researcher with the palliative care team at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, attending clinical rounds weekly, and taught in the graduate communication management program at USC Annenberg. She is currently serving on the steering committee for an inaugural Symposium on Conflict Leadership, a collaborative initiative between LMU and the Academy for Jewish Religion California planned for fall 2026.