While working at both Penn and Goold Studios, Worth created and was named director of the Documentary Film Laboratory and supervisor of Media Laboratories at the Annenberg School. In 1964, Worth decided to devote himself entirely to teaching and research in visual communication, and moved to Philadelphia to take a full-time position as assistant professor of Communications at the Annenberg School. In 1966, Worth was promoted to associate professor and director of the Media Laboratories, and in 1973 he was named professor of communication and education. In 1971 Penn awarded him an M.A. Honoris Causa. In 1976, Worth created the Undergraduate Major in Communications in the College at Penn, and was appointed the first chair of the new major. Worth's promotions recognized the outstanding research and scholarship that he had undertaken while at Penn. In 1966 he received a National Science Foundation grant for a study with Navajo Indians through which he expanded his ideas about bio-documentary film, a concept that he had pioneered as early as 1964 in a paper at a meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. This project, a study of cross-cultural communication, instructed a group of Navajo on the Pine Springs Reservation in Arizona in the art of filmmaking, and led to the publication in 1972 of his book "Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology", co-authored by the anthropologist John Adair. In 1967 Worth received the Wenner-Gren Foundation award for outstanding research in communication and anthropology. From 1968 to 1972 Worth also held a Visiting Research Professorship at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where he worked with the Department of Community Medicine to develop a bio-documentary teaching unit to enable doctors, medical students, patients, and members of the community to present themselves and their world on film. In 1972, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Worth organized and taught (together with Jay Ruby, Carroll Williams, and Karl Heider) a summer institute which took selected doctoral students and young faculty in the social sciences and helped them to learn how to use the visual media of still photography, motion pictures, and television for research and communication. The result of this institute was the formation of the first professional organization for visual anthropology, The Society For The Anthropology of Visual Communication. Worth served as president from 1972 to 1974. The first scholarly journal in this field, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, also grew out of the institute. Worth served as its editor until his death in 1977. As the author of over two dozen scholarly papers, Worth was recognized in the fields of anthropology and communications well beyond his own sub-field of visual communication.