Rita Kirk is a professor of Corporate Communication and Public Affairs at Southern Methodist University.  Concurrently, she holds the William F May Endowed Chair as the Director of the Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility.  Her passions for aligning resources with innovation, empowering ideas, and building coalitions in order to successfully implement strategic initiatives is a hallmark of her work. A frequent news commentator and featured speaker, she excels as a communication strategist who specializes in the analysis of public arguments and the successful (and ethical) implementation of communication campaigns.  Kirk served as an analyst for CNN and other news outlets during presidential elections and major political events for 16 years.  She continues to consult with national and multinational corporations on public policy and leadership.  The author of five books and numerous articles, Kirk’s current research focuses on election integrity and the politics of trust.  This research fellowship focuses on System Trust, that part of the social contract where organizations are given custody of the public’s trust as an element of governance.  Despite the amount of data showing that voting irregularities are rare and nearly nonexistent, the public distrust of our institutions has steadily increased over the last two decades.  Kirk contends that we must account for the human interaction with information, our hopes and fears for the future, and our sense-making of the world that reflect our values.  In this way, she seeks to better understand how public opinion becomes inconsistent with factual evidence, and what can be done to halt the steady decline of public trust.