By Amanda Bingham, PTW Intern and MA Student
For this final faculty spotlight of the spring 2025 semester, we are shifting the limelight to PTW professor, alumna, and researcher Dr. Heidi Lawrence.
Dr. Lawrence, who entered the PTW program at Mason after working as a professional writer for a government contractor, initially envisioned herself starting a consulting business and working as an adjunct instructor with a master’s degree. However, after entering the program, she found her interest in PTW guiding her in a different direction. “Over time, my interest changed. I got a lot more interested in what PTW can do, what its capacities were. I got really into research. And I also started to realize I didn’t necessarily want to have a foot in both worlds. I wanted to kind of pick one and run with that,” she said. To delve deeper into writing and rhetoric, after graduating from Mason with her master’s degree, she completed a PhD at Virginia Tech.
While at Virginia Tech, Dr. Lawrence stumbled into the realm of medical rhetoric and medical humanities, the research topic that would eventually lead to her publishing her book, Vaccine Rhetorics, in 2020. As a research assistant to a project on vaccine refusal, she presented at a statewide consortium of graduate students. She shared how this experience revealed to her the very real need for experts in communication in the fields of science and health, saying, “what fascinated me about these conversations that I was having at this conference was that the people coming up to my poster and my presentation were doctors from other schools around the Commonwealth… who were there with their own graduate students, and they were like, 'Vaccines? Yes, we don’t know how to talk about vaccines! Did you figure it out? Somebody in English needs to figure this out…’ That was really where it all clicked for me… this is about professional writing.”
After her experience at the consortium, Dr. Lawrence shifted the focus of her dissertation to medical rhetoric and medical humanities, producing a project on vaccine refusal. “I like to think of my work as being in vaccine belief,” she said, “understanding how people come to believe the things they believe about vaccines, good and bad.”
Now, along with a few other courses in PTW, Dr. Lawrence teaches a series of classes at Mason on proposal writing. Through these courses, she aims to support writers at different levels in developing the skills needed to thrive in the multifaceted proposal writing field. Especially in the Washington, DC, area, the skill of proposal writing, as Dr. Lawrence puts it, “is like a doorway to so many different opportunities.”
She also sees her role as an instructor as being responsible for connecting students with the many “real,” “fulfilling work opportunities” in PTW. When she first started out, she didn’t know how to advance or continue to learn and develop. Now, through her teaching and mentorship, she supports students who find themselves in that same position. In her words, “I want to show students that professional and technical writing encompasses a ton of different opportunities and competencies. You can always be learning in that field, and there are so many different opportunities for you to have leadership positions, managerial positions, writing in different types and parts of the organization… I think it's important as faculty to communicate that to our students. So that's the teaching side of what PTW means to me...it's a gateway for people who are strong communicators and good at English, to kind of get into these different fields, and to have fulfilling careers and opportunities after graduation.”
May 14, 2025