Emily Gest
Associate Vice Chancellor for News and Media Relations
Emily Gest is the Associate Vice Chancellor for News and Media Relations and oversees the university’s news office, which includes writers and editors, the Inside UMass campus newsletter, video production, and social media team.
Early in her career, Emily was a reporter for The New York Daily News, then the sixth-largest paper in the country. While there, she was a finalist, with other staff members, for a Pulitzer Prize. She covered breaking news, including the impact of 9/11 on victims’ families, as well as health, entertainment, and general feature stories. She has also worked for Los Angeles Times Magazine and Mother Jones Magazine.
As a PR professional, Emily has extensive experience working in government, higher education, healthcare, and the law. She is a versatile writer and true generalist with first-rate media counseling experience. Most recently Emily served as senior director of Media Relations at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, where she oversaw the earned and social media teams as they achieved business goals for enterprise-wide initiatives, including major announcements, global news events, campaign launches and reputational challenges, including crisis management.
For more than a decade, Emily worked at Rubenstein, a strategic communications firm, where she counseled numerous clients, including non-profits and foundations. She was also Director of Communications for the Georgia State Department of Juvenile Justice and the DeKalb County Solicitor-General, a prosecutor.