1. Title: Assistant Professor in the Harrington School of Communication and Media’s Department of Communication Studies and Program in Film/Media

2. Expertise: Media market research, media advertising and history, film history

3. The Big Question: You’re a young, newly minted scholar with a Ph.D. in film and television studies from UCLA. What to do next—tenured position at a respected university? VP of a television network? Yet how could you ignore one of modern life’s most burning questions: Why are people so keen on Keeping Up with the Kardashians? For Wyatt, the answer was “All of the above.”

4. The Career Path: Leaving academia for television and then leaving television for academia was the plan, Wyatt says: “I always intended to bring all this knowledge back to the classroom.”

He left a tenured position at the University of Arizona in 2000 for a 15-year career in television, serving as a vice president of research for E!/NBCUniversal and CMT/MTV Networks/Viacom. That meant qualitative and quantitative research for shows such as Desperate Housewives, Lost, Grey’s Anatomy and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. (FYI: Fans of the show told Wyatt that it isn’t the glitz and glamour that keeps them coming back. It’s the curiosity about living in a large, blended family and the fantasy of having a large group of squabbling sisters who, nonetheless, have your back when it comes to the rest of the world.)

5. Kingston Calling: For the past two years, Wyatt has made sure his students learn what it takes to work in media through real-world creative exercises. A typical assignment might be students pitching television tag lines to their classmates. “It mirrors the experience of working in a creative ad agency,” Wyatt explains. “Students want to know what it takes to break in. I tell them, ‘It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about collaboration, and putting the ego in check so you can work with others in a creative environment.’”