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Alicia Roberts

Associate Director, News and Public Relations

Alicia Roberts began her communications career as a newspaper journalist, and her media experience now spans content marketing and social media strategy, advertising and brand strategy, media relations, podcast planning and business-to-business publishing.

She worked as metro editor at The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., where her enterprise reporting staff won multiple awards for special investigations, and as a news editor at The Charlotte Observer. While at the Observer, she served as director of partner relations for the Charlotte News Alliance, an innovative grant project connecting newspapers with emerging hyper-local news organizations. Since 2010, she has written about health and science research, among other topics, for Wake Forest University.

Alicia earned her B.S. in English and communications from the University of Dayton in Ohio.


Stories by Alicia


Public health volunteer Reagan Smith earns 2025 Community Impact Student Award

Volunteering while studying at Wake Forest University has changed senior Reagan Smith’s life, given her a greater sense of purpose—and earned her a Community Impact Student Award from North Carolina Campus Engagement (NCCE). Every year, the award goes to a student at each participating NCCE member school. The organization is a statewide network of colleges…

Categories: Pro Humanitate


When students belong, they’re more likely to earn a degree

Students are more likely to attain their degree when they report a stronger sense of belonging in their first year of college, according to a new study by Wake Forest University psychology professor Shannon Brady.  A one-point increase on a five-point belonging scale corresponded to a 3.4 percentage-point bump in the likelihood that a student…

Categories: Research & Discovery


Don’t call it exercise

Jason Fanning has spent a lot of time talking to older adults about leading healthy, active lifestyles. And he knows that the minute he utters the word “exercise,” he loses many of them. Instead, he talks to them about movement across the day, a key component of his current research study, A Mobile Health Intervention…


TurkeyPalooza tackles increased demand this holiday

With community partners ramping up for an increased need for Thanksgiving meals this season, the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest University kicks off its annual TurkeyPalooza on Sunday, Nov. 16. The goal of this annual tradition: Prepare a Thanksgiving feast for those in need in Forsyth County—more than 600, at last count. Student volunteers will…


Wake Forest’s Project Pumpkin welcomes local schoolchildren to annual fall festival

Hundreds of kids will trick-or-treat around Wake Forest University’s Benson University Center from 3-6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 28, for the annual Project Pumpkin fall festival, a University student-led event to bring together students, faculty, staff and Winston-Salem communities. Media are invited to attend. Please contact media@wfu.edu to confirm plans to visit. Check-in will be at…