Dr. Wayne Beach is a Professor of Communication at San Diego State University, Adjunct Professor, Department of Surgery, and Member of the Moores UCSD Cancer Center, University of California San Diego. He is author of more than 75 articles and Conversations about Illness (1996) and A Natural History of Family Cancer (2009), which received two prestigious book awards from the National Communication Association. He edited the first Handbook of Patient-Provider Interactions (2013), a compilation of seminal studies of communication during medical interviews and clinical encounters. His research has been funded by NIH, NCI, ACS, and private foundations. He is an expert on health communication, particularly cancer communication and conversation analysis. He is visiting Lincoln in conjunction with his NIH funded research on “Conversations about Cancer.”