Staff : Diane Brown

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Contact
habrown @ iupui.edu
317-274-2195

Office
Administration Building (AO)
355 N. Lansing Street, Suite 136
Indianapolis, IN 46202

Assistant Director of Media Relations

A co-worker once described what I do as "selling the world on IUPUI." Given the wide-ranging degree programs on this campus; the expertise of outstanding faculty and staff; and the academic achievements and civic engagement of IUPUI students, it is a job worthy of true passion.

My professional background for this job includes almost a decade of reporting for a daily newspaper in Los Angeles County, Calif., along with a stint as a general reporter for a Houston weekly community newspaper. I also earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Ga.

However, my passion for "selling education" is rooted in a saga that began in the early 1900s with Tennessee grandparents who sent their two oldest children to live in a boarding house about 40 miles from home so that those girls could attend the nearest public high school. Those grandparents, realizing the limitations of their income as sharecroppers, would eventually uproot the entire family to ensure their seven younger children also could get what they considered a higher education.

After that move, my great-grandparents would affirm the value of getting an education by finding a way to travel across those 40 miles to attend the high school graduations of my mom and her siblings even though my great-grandparents never owned a car or truck.

The legacy of sacrifice for and commitment to education demonstrated by those two generations continues to water my family tree.

So I spend my working days promoting IUPUI by writing press releases issued to newspapers, magazines, TV and radio shows; and feature stories for the IUPUI alumni magazine or the IUPUI Web site. My work also involves arranging interviews between news reporters and IUPUI professors who have the expertise to assist the reporters as they help readers and viewers understand the news of the day.

In this case, it's all about the value of "higher ed."