Christoph Mergerson

Dr. Christoph Mergerson is an assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. He joined Merrill College as a visiting assistant professor in Fall 2021 and was appointed to the rank of assistant professor the following year. He is currently the lead instructor for Merrill College's journalism history course.

In addition to journalism history, his research and teaching interests include weather and disaster journalism, journalism and democracy, and media law and ethics. His research on the factors that influence the job satisfaction of television weathercasters and why it matters for our democratic society in the United States was recently published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. He is also researching the evolution of weathercasting in the postbroadcast era and the history of women in television meteorology in the Space Age.

Prior to academia, Mergerson was a public affairs manager for a disaster preparedness organization and a radio producer in New Orleans. He was also an intern in the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy at the National Weather Service’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a media policy researcher with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Mergerson earned his doctorate in media studies from Rutgers University, and has a master's degree in public affairs from The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from California State University, Northridge.