Emeri Burks

After graduating from Boston University with two bachelor’s degrees (International Relations and East Asian Studies), I followed my love of China to the city of Guangzhou – where I worked for a decade. For seven years as Regional Teacher Trainer to the largest English Training company in China overseeing and developing hundreds of teachers in the southern region of Guangdong, I managed branded communications from regular newsletters to technical training manuals. I trained staff new to China on cultural awareness related to race, nationality, and politics (in addition to CELTA-standard teaching skills). I managed new staff onboarding and training initiative projects, as well as performed extensive professional development reporting across departments.

Last May, I graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master’s degree in Journalism, a specialization in Online Interactive Media, and a 4.0 GPA. For my thesis I published https://a.co/d/57yAGVy I ran in 2021 exploring news media’s racial reckoning since the murder of George Floyd. That spring, I published my study on https://a.co/d/57yAGVy and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0Z6XZ8mSs4&t=3s, had it written up in the https://rjionline.org/news/news-medias-racial-reckoning/, and was interviewed on the podcast “https://itsalljournalism.com/555-media-industry-still-wrestles-with-racial-reckoning-sparked-by-george-floyds-death/” to talk about my research. I encourage you to view my findings if you’d like to see work representative of my expertise.

Recently I got the opportunity of a lifetime associate producing at NHK – Japan’s only public broadcasting network – to learn broadcast journalism under one of the foremost business and technology foreign correspondents to the Japanese people. From researching AI research and initiatives to transcription and news aggregation, I’m astonished at how much I learned in my short time there, and I’m eager to apply my new skills in my next big challenge.