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About the Contributors xxi

speaker, she has shared her many experiences at conferences and seminars across
North America and elsewhere in the world.

François Lagarde is a Canadian social marketing and communications consultant
and trainer for numerous organizations in the health, philanthropy, development
aid, and housing fields in Canada and in nine countries abroad. From 1984 to 1991,
he worked for ParticipACTION, a national fitness promotion agency, where he
served as vice president and manager of national media campaigns. He is an adjunct
professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montreal, where he teaches
social marketing in the health administration and public health programs. He has
published numerous reports, book chapters, cases, guides, and articles. He is a mem-
ber of the Social Marketing Quarterly editorial review board. He is also a member of
the steering committee for the “Innovations in Social Marketing” conference. As part
of his consultancy, he acts as a senior advisor to Saskatchewan in Motion.
Ruth Massingill has more than 20 years experience in journalism, public relations,
and advertising as a professional communicator as well as an administrator and
faculty member at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Recent
awards she has received include the 2008 Excellence in Teaching Award and the
2007 Achievement in Mass Communication Award for Outstanding Research and
Scholarship (SHSU College of Humanities and Social Science), Outstanding
Educator (American Advertising Federation, 2002), and Outstanding Faculty
(University of Phoenix-Houston, 2003). She is lead author for a book on prison
communications, Prison City: Life with the Death Penalty in Huntsville, Texas (Peter
Lang, 2007), and regularly presents communication research papers at national and
international conferences. She holds an MA in journalism from the University of
Wyoming and is currently working toward a PhD in social marketing from the
University of Teesside in Middlesbrough, England.
Rowena Merritt is program manager at the National Social Marketing Centre (in
London), leading development of the local practitioner development and support
program. She has helped develop training, skills, and related resources and has
overseen the establishment of a number of collaborative demonstration initiatives
with local organizations. She is also the convenor for the National Social Marketing
Academic Advisory Group, which is helping expand academic sector capacity in
social marketing. She graduated in 2001 from Imperial College with a first in busi-
ness studies. She spent the third year of the course working with Depression
Alliance, a mental health charity, coordinating its marketing and publications.
This experience awoke an interest in applying marketing techniques to the allevia-
tion of depression. She commenced a DPhil with the University of Oxford in 2002.
Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2006, explores the use of social marketing tech-
niques to improve clinical outcomes for depressed patients.