Naessiamba Eab-Aggrey

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Health Communication, Social Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Communication, Global Health, AI & Digital Health Literacy, Climate Change Literacy.

Naessiamba Eab-Aggrey is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Communication at George Mason University and a pharmacist with nearly half a decade of practice in Ghana. There she held managerial roles and served as a superintendent pharmacist in retail and wholesale settings. Her work taught her that understanding medicines matters as much as accessing them. That insight drives her patient-centered scholarship.

Her research is rooted in social pharmacy, where she studies the social, cultural, behavioral, and communicative factors that shape how people access, understand, and use medicines. Also, drawing on health communication, pharmaceutical communication, and digital health, she studies how patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals engage with AI-enabled tools, online platforms, and emerging health innovations. She looks at how these encounters affect trust and decision-making in both communicable and non-communicable disease contexts.

In addition, Naessiamba's work examines how communication can strengthen provider-patient interaction, medication understanding, adherence, safety, and evidence-based medicine use. She gives particular attention to populations facing compounded barriers of literacy, access, and trust. She also explores how climate change literacy intersects with health behavior and outcomes in resource-limited settings.

Her work rests on a mixed-methods approach that links population-level patterns to individual meaning-making, showing what is happening in health communication and why it matters to the people affected. Taking a transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary lens, she combines theory and evidence from pharmacy, communication science, public health, and digital health to address complex, real-world health problems.

At George Mason, she has served as a Graduate Research Assistant and teaches Foundations of Health Communication and Fundamentals of Communication as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. She previously served as Director of Communications for the Graduate and Professional Students Association. She holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy from the University of Ghana, a Master’s degree in Communication from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a Global Health Certificate from McGill University.

Her goal is to use communication as a strategic bridge between clinical evidence, pharmaceutical practice, and patient understanding, to reduce health disparities and improve health outcomes globally.

Selected Publications

Harrell-Webber, A., Chang, W. L., Eab-Aggrey, N., Taylor, B. G., Lamuda, P. A., Pollack, H. A., ... & Zhao, X. (2026). Opioid Message Fatigue in the United States: Prevalence and Associations with Stigma and Policy Support. Substance Use & Misuse, 1-13.

Khan S, & Eab-Aggrey, N. (2025). A double-edged sword?: Digitalization, health disparities, and the paradoxical case of e-pharmacy in Ghana. Digital Health. 2025;11. doi:10.1177/20552076251326224

Eab-Aggrey, N., & Khan, S. (2024). Prospects and challenges of online pharmacy in post-Covid world: a qualitative study of pharmacists' experiences in Ghana. Exploratory Research in Clinical and Social Pharmacy, 13, 100395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rcsop.2023.100395

Courses Taught

COMM 304-DL1 Foundations of Health Communication

COMM 101-Fundamentals of communication, 2023/2024- 2024/2025

COM 3083: Language and Communication Theory

Education

George Mason University, Ph.D. Health Communication, in progress

University of Texas at San Antonio, Master's in Communication, 2020-2022