Manny Chavez is interim director of the MSU Julian Samora Research Institute (JSRI), the premier research institute in the Midwest. A professor in the MSU School of Journalism, Dr. Chavez works on issues of sociology of the media, media law, crisis reporting, and international press systems. He studies models of access to information, accountability, and transparency, especially related to the news media in the Americas. Also, he works on issues related to the Latino communities, including news consumption, political attitudes, and crisis coverage.

He has published several articles and books and received multiple grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, Tinker Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of State, and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). In 2019 he received the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Prize for his edited book, News Media Coverage of Environmental Challenges. Mediating Demand, Degradation and Development. Since 2023 he has been Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, in Salzburg, Austria.

Chavez is affiliated faculty in JSRI, where he was a postdoc. He is the past president of the Association for Latino Media Markets and Communication Research and served as president of the Association for Borderlands Studies.