Dimitri Christakis, MD, MPH

Dr. Christakis is director of Seattle Children’s Research Institute’s Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Christakis is a leading expert on how media affects child health and development. He has published dozens of media-related studies and co-authored a groundbreaking book, The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for your Kids. His work has been featured on Anderson Cooper 360, the Today Show, ABC, NBC, and CBS news as well as all major national newspapers. Christakis received his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed his residency at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Michael Rich, MD, MPH

Having come to medicine after a twelve-year career as a filmmaker; Dr. Rich is cognizant of the image and of the primacy of mass media as a source of information and influence. His current research brings together his experience in medicine and communications, focusing on media as a force which affects health and health behavior and as a tool for medical research, education, health care policy, and advocacy. He is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, whose mandate is to study and disseminate information on the effects of and uses for communications media in child health, and a member of the Editorial Board of Pediatrics, focusing on issues regarding uses for communications media in child health research. Dr. Rich has done content analyses of music videos for portrayals of health risk behaviors and developed interactive media-based health education and interventions. He has developed a new research methodology, Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA), which is based on patients creating a video illness narrative of their lives with a medical condition which are then analyzed from medical, psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives.

Dr. Patti Valkenburg, PhD

Patti M. Valkenburg (1958) has been professor of Youth and Media at the University of Amsterdam since 1998. In 2011, she was appointed distinguished research professor at the UvA’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. She is founder and director of the Center for Research on Children, Adolescents and the Media (CcaM). She was awarded the prestigious NWO Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific prize in the Netherlands, in 2011. In 2012, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) awarded a ‘Gravitation’ grant worth 27.6 million euros for the research project ‘Individual Development: Why Some Children Thrive, and Others do Not’, a collaborative project in the Netherlands for which she is one of the five principal researchers. Patti Valkenburg is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Valkenburg conducts research into theories that can explain the cognitive, emotional and social effects of media. Last year, the scientific journal Communication Education named her the most productive communication scientist in Europe. She established and developed the Youth and Media discipline at the UvA. Under her leadership, the CcaM has become the largest research center of its kind in the world.

Jeremy Bailenson, PhD

Dr. Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Faculty Director of Stanford’s Digital Learning Forum, and a Faculty Leader at Stanford’s Center for Longevity. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor. Bailenson’s main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. His findings have been published in over 100 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, environmental science, law, medicine, political science, and psychology. His book Infinite Reality, coauthored with Jim Blascovich, was recently quoted by the Supreme Court outlining the effects of immersive media.

Sherry Turkle, PhD

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Professor Turkle writes on the “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers. She is an expert on mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She has been named “woman of the year” by Ms. Magazine and among the “forty under forty” who are changing the nation by Esquire Magazine. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Turkle is a featured media commentator on the social and psychological effects of technology for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the BBC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report.

Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, DO

Dr. Pamela Hurst-DellaPietra (pam@childrenandscreens.com) is the founder and president of the Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, a nonprofit organization stimulating a dialogue on the impact of digital media on children and adolescents. The Institute organized a national conference on this subject for the National Academy of Sciences last year.
She is also the co-founder of Lift Up Long Island, a Youth Venture program, mobilizing primary and secondary school students throughout Long Island to become “change-makers” in their communities. A Long Island-based philanthropist along with her husband Stephen, a few recent projects include endowing a chair in biomedical imaging at Stony Brook Medicine, starting the DellaPietra lecture series at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, which brings the best and brightest minds of our time in science and math to high school and college students on Long Island and developing a weekend enrichment program for gifted high school students in math and science. Pamela also developed the Mount Career Laboratory, a series of hands-on career workshops, which helped that school earn New York State’s Blue Ribbon of Excellence. She currently serves on the President’s task force of the Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, and has been recognized as Person of the Year by the Suffolk County Boys and Girls Clubs. She has also served as the founding director of several other highly successful non-profit organizations and programs. Early in her career, Dr. Hurst-Della Pietra worked in television production for children’s educational programs such as Sesame Street.

Harold Koplewicz, MD

Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, founding president of the Child Mind Institute, is one of the nation’s leading child and adolescent psychiatrists. He is widely recognized as an innovator in the field, a strong advocate for child mental health, and a master clinician. He has been repeatedly recognized in America’s Top Doctors, Best Doctors in America, and New York Magazine’s “Best Doctors in New York,” and was named one of WebMD’s 2014 Health Heroes for his activism on behalf of children with psychiatric or learning disorders. He has been at the forefront of public education to dispel the myths and stigma surrounding children and adolescents living with psychiatric disorders. He is the author of several books, including the textbook Depression in Children and Adolescents; It’s Nobody’s Fault: New Hope and Help for Difficult Children and their Parents, which received the Parent’s Choice Award and was a finalist for the Books for a Better Life Award; Childhood Revealed: Art Expressing Pain, Discovery & Hope; and his most recent work on adolescent depression, More Than Moody: Recognizing and Treating Adolescent Depression.

Charles A. Czeisler, PhD, MD, FRCP

Dr. Czeisler has more than 30 years’ experience in the field of basic and applied research on the physiology of the human circadian timing system and its relationship to the sleep-wake cycle. For more than a decade he served as Team Leader of the Human Performance Factors, Sleep and Chronobiology Team of NASA’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is responsible for developing sleep-wake schedule guidelines and related countermeasures for use by NASA astronauts and mission control personnel during space exploration. Dr. Czeisler has served on and consulted to a number of national and international advisory committees, including the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the Sleep Research Society, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Transport Association and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of the US Department of Transportation.

Dan Romer, PhD

Dan Romer, Ph.D., is director of the Adolescent Communication Institute (ACI) of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. He has conducted research at the Annenberg School and Policy Center since 1990, focusing on media and social influences on adolescent health with particular attention to the social transmission of risky behavior. He has studied the effects of local television news on race relations and inter-group tension. In addition, he has studied the role of education on the civic and political engagement of adolescents. He recently coordinated a four-city intervention using mass media to reduce unprotected sex in high-risk adolescents, a project done in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health. He is currently studying a cohort of adolescents in Philadelphia to understand the risk factors that underlie early use of drugs and other threats to healthy development, a project supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He is also studying the effects of pictorial warning labels for cigarettes, a project supported by the National Cancer Institute.

Jason Chein, PhD

Dr. Chein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology (Brain, Behavior, & Cognition) at Temple University. Broadly, research in Dr. Chein’s laboratory employs a cognitive neuroscientific approach to evaluate alternative theoretical claims surrounding the basic mechanisms of cognition, the relationship among these mechanisms, and the contribution each makes to high-level cognitive function. Dr. Chein has extensive training in the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and employs this technique in combination with traditional behavioral measures to pursue his research goals. His primary research focus is on the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of working memory (immediate memory, short-term memory, controlled attention), and its role in cognitive control, learning, and decision making. Dr. Chein obtained his undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Computer Science from Temple University in 1997, and rejoined the Temple community as a member of the faculty in January of 2006. During the interim, he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in cognitive psychology with a specialization in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University.

Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD

Dr. Gazzaley obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He is the founding director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center at the UC San Francisco, an Associate Professor in Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry, and Principal Investigator of a cognitive neuroscience laboratory. A major accomplishment of his research has been to expand our understanding of alterations in the aging brain that lead to cognitive decline. His most recent studies explore how we may enhance our cognitive abilities via engagement with custom designed video games, neurofeedback and TES. Dr. Gazzaley has authored over 100 scientific articles, delivered almost 400 invited presentations around the world, and his research and perspectives have been consistently profiled in high-impact media, such as The New York Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Discover, Wired, PBS, NPR, CNN and NBC Nightly News. Recently, he wrote and hosted the nationally televised, PBS-sponsored special “The Distracted Mind with Dr. Adam Gazzaley”.

Tom Robinson, MD, MPH

Dr. Robinson originated the solution-oriented research paradigm and directs the Solutions Science Lab at Stanford. He is known for his pioneering obesity prevention and treatment research, including the concept of stealth interventions. Dr. Robinson focuses on solution-oriented research to develop and evaluate health promotion and disease prevention interventions for children, adolescents and their families to directly inform medical and public health practice and policy.His research is largely experimental in design, conducting family, school, and community-based randomized controlled trials to test the efficacy and/or effectiveness of theory-driven behavioral, social and environmental interventions to prevent and reduce obesity, improve nutrition, increase physical activity and decrease inactivity, reduce children’s screen time, and promote energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Robinson’s research is grounded in social cognitive models of human behavior uses rigorous methods, and is performed in real World settings with diverse populations, making the results of his research more relevant for clinical and public health practice and policy. Robinson received both his B.S. and M.D. from Stanford University and his M.P.H. in Maternal and Child Health from the University of California, Berkeley.

Daniel Anderson, PhD

Professor Anderson studies children and television including children’s interactions during TV viewing and the impact on cognitive development and education. His current research concerns television and very young children, brain activation during media use, and television viewing and children’s diet. He actively advises television producers on the creation of curriculum-based shows for children. He has worked on Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, Super Why and Bear in the Big Blue House, among others. His published work concerns attention, comprehension, viewing behavior, and the long term impact of television on development. He also advises on applied research, strategic planning, and policy issues related to children’s media and is on several national advisory boards.

Rachel Barr, PhD

Dr. Barr is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on understanding the learning and memory mechanisms that development during infancy. Because infants are preverbal techniques rely on imitation and learning methods to find out what infants have learned and how well and how long they remember it. Research has focused on how infants pick up information from different sources, television, siblings, adults, and different contexts. Most recently, research at the Georgetown Early Learning Project focuses on factors that might enhance infant learning from television. Dr. Barr earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Otago in New Zealand. She received her diploma of Clinical Psychology and her BS also from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Heather Kirkorian, PhD

Heather Kikorian received her Ph.D. (2007) in Developmental Psychology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she also completed her postdoctoral training. She has been an Assistant Professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2010. Her research interests are at the intersection of early cognitive development and media effects. She is also interested in identifying techniques to increase the value of media for very young children, enabling producers to create educationally valuable media and empowering parents to use these media effectively. Her current projects include explorations of attention and learning, young children’s attention to and comprehension of screen media, toddlers’ ability to learn from interactive touchscreen devices, and the impact of television on cognitive development.

Sarah Lytle, PhD

Dr. Sarah Roseberry Lytle is the Director of the Outreach and Education division at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) at the University of Washington. The I-LABS Outreach and Education team communicates the latest science of child development to those who can act on it, including parents, educators, policymakers, and opinion leaders. Under Sarah’s leadership, the Outreach and Education team has launched an online library of free training modules designed to make science accessible to a broad audience. Dr. Lytle has a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Temple University, where she studied the role of social cues in infants’ and toddlers’ language learning from screen media, and she is currently a Zero To Three Fellow.

Jeremy Roschelle, PhD

Jeremy Roschelle, Ph.D., is co-director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. In his research, Roschelle examines the design and classroom use of innovations that enhance learning of complex and conceptually difficult ideas in mathematics and science. Through cognitive science-based research on the Envisioning Machine and later SimCalc, he has explored how computer-based representations can make the mathematics of change and the related physics of motion accessible to many more students. Two running themes in his work are the study of collaboration in learning and the appropriate use of advanced or emerging technologies (such as component software and wireless handhelds) in education. Roschelle specializes in the design and development of integrated interventions to enhance learning of complex and conceptually difficult mathematics and science; learning sciences-based research in mathematics education, on collaborative learning, and with interactive technology; and the management of large-scale multiyear, multi-institutional research and evaluation projects. His B.S. degree in computer science is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His Ph.D. in learning sciences is from the University of California, Berkeley. Roschelle was named an SRI Fellow in 2008.

Naomi Baron, PhD

Professor Baron is interested in electronically-mediated communication, writing and technology, the history of English, and higher education. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Fellow, she has published seven books. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008. She was named University Honors Program Professor of the Year and received an American University Presidential Research Fellowship. Professor Baron has appeared extensively in the media, including interviews on Good Morning America, ABC News 20/20, CNN, The Diane Rehm Show, All Things Considered, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, New Yorker, Fortune, and Time. Her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, was published in early 2015. Professor Baron taught at Brown University, Emory University, and Southwestern University before coming to American University, where she has served in College of Arts and Sciences as associate dean for undergraduate affairs, associate dean for curriculum and faculty development, chair of the Department of Language and Foreign Studies, and Director of the TESOL Program.

Mimi Ito, PhD

Dr. Ito is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. During her graduate work at Stanford, she worked at the Institute for Research on Learning, Xerox PARC, and Apple, studying up the emerging field of social and cultural studies of digital technology use. For many years she had a research group at Keio studying mobile technology use. A few years ago she completed a study with Peter Lyman and Michael Carter on a multi-year project on digital kids and informal learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this, she did case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world, focusing on anime music videos and fansubs. She edited a book for MIT Press with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda entitled Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, and her book on children’s software is Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software. Her co-authored book reporting on the digital youth project, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Her research on anime fandom appears in a book she helped edit, Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World.

John F. Pane, PhD

John F. Pane is a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He is also co-director of the Carnegie Mellon and RAND Traineeships in Methodology and Interdisciplinary Research (CMART), an IES postdoctoral training program. He researches the implementation and effectiveness of educational innovations, with a focus on math, science, and education technology initiatives. His expertise includes the application of experimental and rigorous quasi-experimental methods in education settings and assessing the impact of new technologies. Pane has been principal investigator of several experiments using individual-level or school-level random assignment, including a large-scale effectiveness trial in 147 schools in 51 school districts in seven states. He is currently leading an evaluation of innovative new schools adopting blended-learning models, and an evaluation of a technology-based initiative to improve college and career readiness in rural Kentucky; he also co-leads an experiment examining the effects of summer learning programs.

James W. Pellegrino, PhD

James W. Pellegrino is Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as Co-director of UIC’s interdisciplinary Learning Sciences Research Institute. His research and development interests focus on children’s and adult’s thinking and learning and the implications of cognitive research and theory for assessment and instructional practice.He has published over 300 books, chapters and articles in the areas of cognition, instruction and assessment. His current research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences. He has served as head of several National Academy of Sciences study committees, including chair of the Study Committee for the Evaluation of the National and State Assessments of Educational Progress, co-chair of the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice, and co-chair of the Committee on the Foundations of Assessment which issued the report Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Most recently he served as a member of the Committee on Science Learning: Games, Simulations and Education, as chair of the Committee on Defining Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills, and co-chair of the Committee on Developing Assessments of Science Proficiency in K-12.

Charles O’Brien, MD, PhD

Dr. O’Brien received his MD and PhD degrees from Tulane University, and received residency training in psychiatry, neurology, and medicine at Harvard, the University of London, Tulane and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He is board-certified in psychiatry, neurology and addiction psychiatry. One of the most prominent addiction researchers in the world, Dr. O’Brien has made many important discoveries and contributions over the past 30 years that have become the standard of care in addiction treatment throughout the world. Aside from developing medications to treat alcohol, opioid, and cocaine dependence, his work has also increased the understanding of the clinical aspects of addiction and the neurobiology of relapse. Among his numerous honors, Dr. O’Brien was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, and received the Nathan B. Eddy award for research from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence in 2003. He has advised our national government on drug policy for decades, and was the President of the American College of Neuro-psycho-pharmacology, and the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.

Douglas A. Gentile, PhD

Dr. Gentile is an award-winning research scientist, educator, author, and is an associate professor of developmental psychology at Iowa State University. His experience includes over 25 years conducting research with children and adults. He is the editor of the book Media Violence and Children: A Complete Guide for Parents and Professionals (2003; 2nd Edition 2014, Praeger Press), and co-author of the book Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (2007, Oxford University Press). He has authored scores of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, including studies on the positive and negative effects of video games on children in several countries, the validity of the American media ratings, how screen time contributes to youth obesity, and what is being called video game and Internet “addiction.” In 2010, he was honored with the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Media Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 46). He was named one of the Top 300 Professors in the United States by the Princeton Review.

Kimberly Young, PhD

Dr. Young is an internationally acknowledged expert and pioneer on Internet addiction and digital detoxification. She is licensed psychologist and she founded the Center for Internet Addiction in 1995. She has published more than 50 journal articles, book chapters, and four books on Internet addiction. Her research has shown cognitive behavior therapy is effective in curing various forms of Internet-related problems. Dr. Young’s research has been cited by hundreds of media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, The London Times, USA Today, Good Morning America, and ABC’s World News Tonight. She has been a keynote speaker at dozens of conferences and universities. Dr. Young has taught in St. Bonaventure’s School of Business since 2002 and recently joined the faculty in the university’s Russell J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She consults in the U.S. and abroad for profits and nonprofits, including IBM, Corning Corporation, and the CIA, on new trends in the management field in training, employee development, and policy development with respect to technology management.

David Strayer, PhD

Dr. Strayer is a Professor of Cognition and Neuroscience at the University of Utah. He oversees the Applied Cognition Lab/Distracted Driving. Their primary research focuses on Attention and Performance, Skill Acquisition and Skilled Performance, Mathematical Modeling of Human Performance, Cognitive Psychophysiology (eye tracking, EEG), Cognition in the Wild (Attention Restoration Theory), Cognitive Distraction in the Vehicle His work examines how attention functions within multiple research domains, from assessing the limits of human multitasking ability while performing complex tasks such as driving, to studying how attentional capacities can be restored by interacting with nature. They use converging methodologies in our lab to measure changes in both attention and performance, from psychophysiological (EEG and fMRI), subjective ratings, to primary (e.g., driving performance) and secondary task (e.g., reaction time) measures.

Megan Moreno, MD, MS, Ed, MPH

Dr. Megan Moreno is a member of the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington. Her research is housed at the Center for Child Health Behavior and Development and she is the PI of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team (SMAHRT). Dr. Moreno received her MD degree from George Washington University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, during that time she also completed a Master’s Degree in Education. She completed a fellowship in Adolescent Medicine at the University of Washington, during that time she also completed a Master’s Degree in Public Health. Dr. Moreno’s research focuses on ways in which technology can be used towards improving adolescent health with particular interests in social media.

Stephanie Brown, PhD

Dr. Brown is an internationally recognized expert on the treatment of alcoholics, adult children of alcoholics and all addicts and their families, based on her research defining a developmental process of active addiction and recovery. Dr. Brown is the widely-published author of eleven academic and popular books on addiction and recovery, including her acclaimed first book, “Treating the Alcoholic: A Developmental Model of Recovery.” She is a licensed psychologist with more than 35 years of clinical experience, a researcher, a consultant and a frequent lecturer in the field of addiction. Dr. Brown is the founder and director of The Addictions Institute, an outpatient counseling and therapy program in Menlo Park, California. She was the founder and director of the Stanford Alcohol Clinic at Stanford University Medical Center, and a Research Associate at the Mental Research Institute where she co-directed The Family Recovery Project. A consultant to clinicians, treatment centers and researchers, she lectures frequently to professional and lay audiences.

Koh Young-Sam, PhD

Koh Young-Sam is the Director of the Korea Internet Addiction Center. The National Information Society Agency (NIA) established the Korea Internet Addiction Center in 2002 in order to promote the proper use of the Internet and smartphones as well as to help those who are having a hard time controlling themselves regarding the use of media. Since the foundation in 2002, the center has conducted such projects like free counseling services, Internet addiction prevention campaigns and surveys on actual status of Internet addiction. It also has produced over 2,300 professional counselors and counseling teachers and developed the Korean diagnostic criteria for internet addiction (K-criteria). In addition, it has supplied its own counseling program that covers from children to adults to counseling institutes nationwide.

Vint Cerf, MS, PhD

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995. Cerf is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the British Computer Society, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He currently serves as Past President of the Association for Computing Machinery, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and completed a term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. President Obama appointed him to the National Science Board in 2012.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 25 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year’s “25 Most Intriguing People.”

Rowell Huesmann, PhD

L. Rowell Huesmann is Amos N. Tversky Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Communication Studies at the University of Michigan and Director of the Aggression Research Program in the Research Center for Group Dynamics at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Huesmann’s research focuses on understanding the psychological foundations of aggressive behavior and in particular on understanding how the observations of others behaving violently influences the development of a youth’s aggressive and violent behavior and produces a contagion of violence. Over the past 45 years, Huesmann has authored over 100 widely cited scientific articles and books including Growing Up To Be Violent (1977), Television and the Aggressive Child (1986), and Aggressive Behavior (1994). He has been Editor of the international journal Aggressive Behavior and was the 2005 recipient of the American Psychological Association’s award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Media Psychology and the 2014 recipient of the International Society for Research on Aggression’s J. Paul Scott Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Aggression Research. He has testified frequently before congress and directed several national committees examining the causes of violence. He was a member of the USA National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Global Violence Prevention from 2010 to 2015. He is a past President of the International Society for Research on Aggression and a life member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge. While on the faculty at Michigan he has been Director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics (2006-2012) and Chair of the Communication Studies Department (1994). He received his BS at the University of Michigan in 1964 and his PhD at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1969. Prior to being on the faculty at Michigan, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale University and Professor of Psychology and chair of the psychology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Craig A. Anderson, PhD

Dr. Anderson is an American professor and director at the Department of Psychology, Iowa State University in Ames, with a PHD from Stanford University in 1980. He has carried out controversial research regarding the effects of violent video games on children, and reports for parents related to this. Anderson wrote a book (2007) on Violent Video Games with co-authors Doug Gentile and Katherine Buckley. He has been a faculty member at Rice University (1980–1988), Ohio State University (visiting, 1984–1985), and the University of Missouri (1988–1999). He joined Iowa State University in 1999 as Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology. He has received teaching awards at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and has been awarded Fellow status by the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. His research has examined the potential association between violent content in video games and subsequent aggression. He is now on the Executive Council of the International Society for Research on Aggression. His research on human aggression has been published in various journals.

Tom Hummer, PhD

Dr. Hummer is interested in applying neuroimaging techniques to examine causes, treatments and predictors of clinical disorders and psychological abnormalities. This research entails multiple levels of neuroimaging experimentation to examine the influence of biological and environmental cues on the brain. He also investigates the relationship of individual neuropsychological and hormonal characteristics to brain structure, activity and connectivity. He is currently investigating how media violence, including play of violent video games, may influence neuropsychological functioning and brain activity. In addition, he is examining executive function capabilities in children with disruptive behavior disorders and/or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the neural abnormalities associated with current and future behaviors in these youth.

Jay Hull, PhD

Dr. Hull’s primary research interests concern the structure of self-knowledge and the dynamics of self-regulation. In pursuing these interests, he has published work in three related content areas: (a) cognitive processes associated with self-awareness and self-consciousness, (b) affective processes associated with self-perception and self-regulation — with a special focus on depression, (c) behavioral consequences of self-regulation — with a special focus on behavioral deviance (including alcohol use and abuse, cigarette smoking, and reckless driving). In all of these areas he has followed a general philosophy that endorses the importance of theory building and model testing as a means of advancing knowledge. As a consequence, he has also published work that explores methodological issues with a special interest in the utility of structural equation modeling in solving practical problems associated with theory testing.

Barbara Krahé, PhD

Dr. Krahé is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her main research interests lie in the area of applied social psychology, in particular aggression research (sexual aggression, media violence and aggression; driving aggression) and social cognition research applied to legal decision-making (rape myths and biases in judgements about sexual assault). Her research has been funded by the German Research Foundation and the European Agency for Health and Consumers and conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Sussex, the University of Michigan, and the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. She is Associate Editor of Aggressive Behavior and editorial board member of the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, the Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, and the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology. She is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Angela Campbell, JD

Professor Campbell teaches at the Institute for Public Representation where she runs the First Amendment and Media Law section (formerly known as the Citizens Communications Center). Prior to joining the Georgetown Faculty in 1988, she was an attorney with the Communications and Finance Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and in private practice as an associate with the law firm Fisher, Wayland, Cooper & Leader. From 1981-83 she was a Graduate Fellow at the Institute. Writings include “Restricting the Marketing of Junk Food to Children by Product Placement and Character Selling” in the Loyola Law Review, “Self-Regulation and the Media” in the Federal Communications Law Journal, “Ads2Kids.com: Should Government Regulate Advertising to Children on the World Wide Web?” in the Gonzaga Law Review, “Lessons from Oz: Quantitative Guidelines for Children’s Educational Television” in Comm/Ent, “Universal Service Provisions: The ‘Ugly Duckling’ of the 1996 Act” in theConnecticut Law Review, “Publish or Carriage: Approaches to Analyzing the First Amendment Rights of Telephone Companies” in the North Carolina Law Review, and “Teaching Advanced Legal Writing in a Law School Clinic” in the Seton Hall Law Review.

Amanda Lenhart, MA

Amanda Lenhart is associate director of research at the Pew Research Center. She is an expert on how adolescents and families use and think about networked technology. She is the lead researcher on Pew Research projects focusing on youth and technology and is the author of numerous reports on the topic, including work on youth and smartphones,online civility and privacy. Lenhart graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a double major in English and Anthropology and earned her master’s with distinction from Georgetown University in Communication, Culture and Technology. She taught at American University, is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and serves as an advisor to the EU Kids Online Project, a massive 33-country research project based at the London School of Economics. She also regularly speaks about her work to policy makers, at conferences and hearings, and to the full range of print, broadcast and digital news media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition, among many others.

Kathryn Montgomery, PhD

Kathryn Montgomery is a full-time professor and Director of the Communication Studies Division. She is also founding Director of American University’s 3-year PhD program in Communication. Throughout her career, Dr. Montgomery has written and published extensively about the role of media in society, addressing a variety of topics, including: the politics of entertainment television; youth engagement with digital media; and contemporary advertising and marketing practices. In addition to numerous journal articles, chapters, and reports, she is author of two books: Target: Prime Time – Advocacy Groups and the Struggle over Entertainment Television (Oxford University Press, 1989); and Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (MIT Press, 2007). Throughout her career, Montgomery’s research, writing, and testimony have helped frame the national public policy debate on a range of critical media issues. From 1991-2003, she was co-founder and President of the nonprofit Center for Media Education, where she spearheaded a national campaign that led to passage of the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the first federal legislation to protect children’s privacy on the Internet.

Lynn Schofield Clark, PhD

Lynn Schofield Clark is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. She currently oversees three research projects: the Teens & The New Media @ Home Project, which explores the introduction of digital and mobile media into U.S. family life (see the book, The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age); the Young MediaMakers Project, which is studying how young people across various walks of life get and share the news that is important to them in relation to their communities of concern; and the Global Students Online Project, which is studying the possibilities for enhanced intercultural understanding through media-making and online interactions. An ethnographer who has studied diverse U.S. families and young people for more than 15 years, Clark is interested in how the everyday uses of media shape peoples’ experiences of their social identities in the context of widening income inequality in the United States.

Elizabeth Englander, PhD

Dr. Englander graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with Phi Beta Kappa and High Honors, and completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Southern California as an All-University Merit Fellow. She was awarded a Presidential Fellowship to found and direct the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, which delivers free anti-violence and anti-bullying programs, resources, and research to K-12 Education. She was the Special Editor for the Cyberbullying issue of the Journal of Social Sciences, and has authored about a hundred articles in academic journals and books. Dr. Englander has been named the Chair of the Cyberbullying Work Group at the Institute for Digital Media and Child Development, which is supported by the National Academy of Sciences to help define the national research agenda concerning digital technology’s impact upon children’s development. She is the author of Understanding Violence, and of Bullying and Cyberbullying: A Guide for Educators, recently released by Harvard Press.

Carrie James, PhD

Dr. James is a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, and Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A sociologist by training, Carrie’s research explores young people’s digital, moral, and civic lives. Since arriving at Project Zero in 2003, Carrie has worked with Howard Gardner and colleagues on The Good Project. She co-directs the Good Play Project, a research and educational initiative focused youth, ethics, and the new digital media, and the Good Participation project, a study of how youth “do civics” in the digital age. Carrie is also co-Principal Investor of the Out of Eden Learn project, an educational companion to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek’s epic Out of Eden walk. Her publications include Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap (The MIT Press, Forthcoming, 2014). Carrie is a recurring faculty member for the Project Zero Classroom and the Future of Learning summer institutes. She holds an M.A.(1996) and a Ph.D.(2003) in Sociology from New York University.

Victor Strasburger, MD

Victor C. Strasburger is Chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine, Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico. He graduated from Yale College, where he studied fiction writing with Robert Penn Warren, and from Harvard Medical School. He trained at the Children’s Hospital in Seattle, St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, and the Boston Children’s Hospital. He has authored more than 160 articles and papers and 12 books on the subject of adolescent medicine and the effects of television on children and adolescents. In 2000, he was recipient of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Adele Delenbaugh Hofmann Award for outstanding lifetime achievement in Adolescent Medicine and the Holroyd-Sherry Awrd for outstanding achievement in public health and the media. He is a consultant to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Communications, has served as a consultant to the National PTA and the American Medical Association on the subject of children and television, and lectures frequently throughout the country.

David Meyer, PhD

Professor David E. Meyer, Ph.D. , is a faculty member of the Cognition and Perception Program in the Department of Psychology at Michigan. A mathematical psychologist and cognitive scientist, he received his Ph. D. from the University of Michigan and subsequently worked for several years as a Member of Technical Staff in the Human Information Processing Research Department at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan. Prof. Meyer is a fellow in the Society of Experimental Psychologists, American Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, and American Association for The Advancement of Science. The American Psychological Association has honored him with its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. His teaching and his research — sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, and Office of Naval Research — have dealt with fundamental aspects of human perception, attention, learning, memory, language, movement production, reaction time, multitasking, executive mental control, human-computer interaction, personality and cognitive style, cognitive aging, cognitive neuroscience, mathematical models, and computational models. Reports of this research have appeared in various books and periodicals such as Science, the Psychological Review, Cognitive Psychology, Memory & Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Memory and Language, and volumes of the Attention and Performance symposium series, as well as other publications.

Melina Uncapher, PhD

Dr. Uncapher is a Research Associate in Psychology at Stanford University. She received both her BS and PhD in Neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine and did her Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University. In 2013 she was named a Network Scholar for The MacArthur Foundations Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. She was the recipient of the NIH/NIMH: Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral National Research Service Award. She is currently an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Science and Law as well as the Co-founder and Director, CEO, of Research for the Institute for Applied Neuroscience: Science for Good.

Anthony Wagner, PhD

Dr. Wagner is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Co-Director of Stanford’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, and Director of the Stanford Memory Laboratory. At Stanford since 2003, his research explores how the brain supports learning, memory, and executive function. In addition to his basic science, his research examines memory dysfunction in clinical populations (including schizophrenia) and the role of neuroscience evidence in legal and educational settings. He is on the faculty in the Psychology Department, and participates in the Neurosciences Program, the Symbolic Systems Program, the Human Biology Program, and the Stanford Center for Longevity. Externally, he is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Project. His research has been recognized through a number of awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution (2006), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2004), the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s Young Investigator Award (2004), and Scholar Awards from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience (2001) and the Ellison Medical Foundation (2001).

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, PhD

Dr. Soojung-Kim Pang studies people, technology, and the worlds they make. His latest book, The Distraction Addiction (Little, Brown & Co. 2013) is about contemplative computing, the effort to use information technologies in ways that help you stay focused and be more creative, rather than distracted and fractured. His current writing project is Rest: How Working Less Gets More Done explores the role that deliberate rest plays in the lives of creative and productive people. Dr. Soojung-Kim Pang is a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights, where he analyzes trends in pervasive computing, wearables, and the Internet of Things. He is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He studied history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, and have held fellowships at Williams College, University of California-Berkeley, and Microsoft Research Cambridge. His first book, Empire and The Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions (Stanford University Press, 2002), is about, well, Victorian solar eclipse expeditions.

Larry Rosen, PhD

Dr. Larry Rosen is Professor and past chair of the psychology department at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is a research psychologist with specialties in multitasking, social networking, generational differences, parenting, child and adolescent development, and educational psychology, and is recognized as an international expert in the “Psychology of Technology.” Over the past 25-plus years, Dr. Rosen and his colleagues have examined reactions to technology among more than 30,000 people in the United States and in 22 other countries. He has written five books including: (1) iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us; (2) Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn; (3) Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation; (4) TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play and (5) The Mental Health Technology Bible. Dr. Rosen has been featured extensively in television, print, and radio media and has been a commentator on Good Morning America, NPR, and CNN. He has been quoted in hundreds of magazines and newspapers including USA Today, New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times.

Ronald Dahl, MD

Stephanie E. Reich, PhD

Stephanie M. Reich earned her Ph.D. in Community Psychology from the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.
Dr. Reich's research focuses on understanding and improving the social context of children’s lives. As such, her empirical investigations center on two contributors to children’s socialization: parents and peers. The bulk of her interest examines parent and peer interactions in early childhood with additional research investigating peer interactions in adolescence. Her professional goal is to illuminate how parents and peers affect children’s socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical development with the aim of creating interventions to promote physical and mental health and academic success.

Rosemarie T. Truglio, PhD

Senior Vice President of Curriculum and Content at Sesame Workshop. Dr. Truglio is responsible for the development of the interdisciplinary curriculum on which Sesame Street is based and oversees content development across platforms (e.g., television, publishing, toys, home video, and theme park activities).
Previously, Dr. Truglio managed an interdisciplinary global content team responsible for all global co-productions and content development across all media platforms, including digital media. From 1997 to 2013, she oversaw all educational research pertaining to program development, the results of which informed both the production and creative decisions for how to enhance the entertaining and educational components of linear and interactive content.

Kathryn Montgomery, PhD

Kathryn Montgomery is a full-time professor and Director of the Communication Studies Division. She is also founding Director of American University’s 3-year PhD program in Communication. Throughout her career, Dr. Montgomery has written and published extensively about the role of media in society, addressing a variety of topics, including: the politics of entertainment television; youth engagement with digital media; and contemporary advertising and marketing practices.

Samantha K. Graff, JD

Attorney, Public Health Law & Policy
Strategy and Policy Advisor at Foundations, think tanks, and policy organizations. Samantha Graff is an attorney focusing on legal research issues relating to childhood obesity and tobacco control. She worked as a fellow with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; an associate at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati; a federal law clerk for Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the Northern District of California; and a case writer for Harvard Business School. She is a graduate of Harvard University (magna cum lade and Phi Beta Kappa) and Yale Law School.

Angela J. Campbell, JD

Professor Campbell teaches at the Institute for Public Representation where she runs the First Amendment and Media Law section (formerly known as the Citizens Communications Center). Prior to joining the Georgetown Faculty in 1988, she was an attorney with the Communications and Finance Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and in private practice as an associate with the law firm Fisher, Wayland, Cooper & Leader.

Tracy Day,

Domestically, she covered the San Francisco earthquake, Oklahoma City bombing, the OJ Simpson criminal trial, the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster and numerous presidential elections. Ms. Day has produced documentaries, specials and live town meeting broadcasts for PBS, The Discovery Channel, CNN, Lifetime and CNBC. In addition to Emmy Awards, she won a Hugo Award, a 2004 Clarion Award and the CINE Golden Eagle for investigative journalism. Ms. Day is a graduate of Duke University and has been an adjunct professor in the Leadership and the Arts program at the Sanford Institute for Public Policy.

Justine Cassell, PhD

Justine Cassell’s research interests originated in the study of human-human conversation and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in allowing computational systems to participate in these activities. This new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic elements of conversation and storytelling in such a way as to embody machines with conversational, social and narrative intelligence so that they could interact with humans in human-like ways. Increasingly, however, her research has come to address the impact and benefits of technologies such as these on learning and communication.
In particular, Cassell is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior.

Lawrence M. Drake II, PhD

Mr. Drake currently serves and President and Chief Executive Officer of the LEAD Program and is responsible for the overall operational and strategic leadership of the organization.
Mr. Drake serves as chairman of Hope 360°, an executive management advisory firm. He is a certified consultant for Personnel Decisions International, an investment adviser for AJIA Capital Holdings, and is a senior partner at Saurus Partners LLC. He retired from The Coca-Cola Company where he was managing director, President/CEO of the $1B West Africa division of Coca-Cola Africa. Previously, he served in senior-level positions with Executive Leadership Council, PepsiCo, Cablevision Systems Corp., and Kraft Inc. He has helped bring several start-ups/mid-stage entrepreneurial companies to market, including Haven Media Group and Dolman Technologies.

Ronald Dahl, MD

Tristan Harris,

David L Hill, PhD

David L. Hill, MD, FAAP, is a vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics, an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Medical School, and Chair Elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media. He is a columnist for Pediatric News and a contributor to Parents.com, and his commentaries have aired on NPR's All Things Considered. Dr. Hill won the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award in 2013 for Dad To Dad: Parenting Like A Pro. He serves as a consultant on child care issues for local and national radio, television, and internet-based media. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina with his wife, thee children, and two step children.

Karl Brauer

David Strayer, PhD

David Strayer, Ph.D, is a Professor of Cognition and Neuroscience in the Psychology Department at the University of Utah. He specializes in Attention and Performance, Skill Acquisition and Skilled Performance, Mathematical Modeling of Human Performance, Cognitive Psychophysiology (eye tracking, EEG), Cognition in the Wild (Attention Restoration Theory), and Cognitive Distraction in the Vehicle.

Naomi Baron, PhD

Professor Baron is interested in electronically-mediated communication, writing and technology, the history of English, and higher education.
A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Fellow, she has published seven books. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008. Her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, will be out in early 2015.

Ellen Wartella, PhD

About Dr. Wartella
She was dean of the College of Communication at the University of Texas from 1993-2004 and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California-Riverside from 2004-2009. Before joining the faculty at Northwestern in March 2010 she was Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Riverside. Dr. Wartella earned her PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and completed her postdoctoral research in developmental psychology in 1981 at the University of Kansas.

Jennifer M. Zosh, PhD

Jennifer M. Zosh graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Delaware with a B.A. in Psychology and minor in Cognitive Science. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Johns Hopkins University where she worked in the Laboratory for Child Development under the direction of Drs. Lisa Feigenson and Justin Halberda. Her main research focus is on working memory development – asking questions such as: How many objects can infants and toddlers remember? What do they remember about hidden objects? How does memory change from infancy to adulthood?
Dr. Zosh’s undergraduate research experience profoundly changed her view of college education and she seeks to actively involve undergraduates in her research.

Candice L. Odgers, PhD

Candice Odgers is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Psychology and Neuroscience and Associate Director of the Center of Child and Family Policy at Duke University. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia and completed her postdoctoral training at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre in London, England. Her research focuses on how social inequalities and early adversity influence children’s future health and well-being, with an emphasis on how new technologies, including mobile phones and web-based tools, can be used to understand and improve the lives of young people.

Daphne Bavelier, PhD

Dr. Bavelier is a biology graduate from the 'Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris', France, received a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA and trained in human brain plasticity under the mentorship of Helen Neville at the Salk Institute, San Diego CA. Dr. Bavelier taught at Georgetown University until 1999, and since then she has been in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at the University of Rochester, NY. Dr. Bavelier recently joined the faculty at the Université of Geneva, Switzerland and changed her status at Rochester to a Research Professor.

Patti Valkenburg, PhD

Valkenburg received her MSc (1992, cum laude) and PhD (1995, cum laude) from Leiden University. In 2010 she was awarded with an Advanced grant from the European Research Council, which is the highest European scientific recognition. She has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, 5 books, and 35 book chapters. In 2011, she was awarded the Spinoza award, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands.

Susan F. Newcomer, PhD

Joan W. Almon

Joan Almon is the Founding Director of the Alliance for Childhood and currently serves as its Director of Programs. She is a former co-chair of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America and a consultant on early childhood education. She believes that one of the best ways to support children is to support their play time, “for in play, children address all the situations in their lives and find solutions for them.

Heather L. Kirkorian, PhD

I received my Ph.D. (2007) in Developmental Psychology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where I also completed my postdoctoral training. I have been an Assistant Professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2010. My research interests are at the intersection of early cognitive development and media effects. I am also interested in identifying techniques to increase the value of media for very young children, enabling producers to create educationally valuable media and empowering parents to use these media effectively.

Rachel Barr, PhD

Dr. Barr is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on understanding the learning and memory mechanisms that development during infancy. Because infants are preverbal techniques rely on imitation and learning methods to find out what infants have learned and how well and how long they remember it. Research has focused on how infants pick up information from different sources, television, siblings, adults, and different contexts. Most recently, research at the Georgetown Early Learning Project focuses on factors that might enhance infant learning from television. Dr. Barr earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Otago in New Zealand. She received her diploma of Clinical Psychology and her BS also from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Dimitri Christakis, MD, MPH

Dr. Christakis is director of Seattle Children’s Research Institute’s Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Christakis is a leading expert on how media affects child health and development. He has published dozens of media-related studies and co-authored a groundbreaking book, The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for your Kids. His work has been featured on Anderson Cooper 360, the Today Show, ABC, NBC, and CBS news as well as all major national newspapers. Christakis received his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed his residency at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Charles A. Czeisler, PhD, MD, FRCP

Dr. Czeisler has more than 30 years’ experience in the field of basic and applied research on the physiology of the human circadian timing system and its relationship to the sleep-wake cycle. For more than a decade he served as Team Leader of the Human Performance Factors, Sleep and Chronobiology Team of NASA’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is responsible for developing sleep-wake schedule guidelines and related countermeasures for use by NASA astronauts and mission control personnel during space exploration. Dr. Czeisler has served on and consulted to a number of national and international advisory committees, including the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the Sleep Research Society, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Transport Association and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of the US Department of Transportation.

Dan Romer, PhD

Dan Romer, Ph.D., is director of the Adolescent Communication Institute (ACI) of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. He has conducted research at the Annenberg School and Policy Center since 1990, focusing on media and social influences on adolescent health with particular attention to the social transmission of risky behavior. He has studied the effects of local television news on race relations and inter-group tension. In addition, he has studied the role of education on the civic and political engagement of adolescents. He recently coordinated a four-city intervention using mass media to reduce unprotected sex in high-risk adolescents, a project done in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health. He is currently studying a cohort of adolescents in Philadelphia to understand the risk factors that underlie early use of drugs and other threats to healthy development, a project supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He is also studying the effects of pictorial warning labels for cigarettes, a project supported by the National Cancer Institute.

Larry Rosen, PhD

Dr. Larry Rosen is Professor and past chair of the psychology department at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is a research psychologist with specialties in multitasking, social networking, generational differences, parenting, child and adolescent development, and educational psychology, and is recognized as an international expert in the “Psychology of Technology.” Over the past 25-plus years, Dr. Rosen and his colleagues have examined reactions to technology among more than 30,000 people in the United States and in 22 other countries. He has written five books including: (1) iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us; (2) Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn; (3) Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation; (4) TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play and (5) The Mental Health Technology Bible. Dr. Rosen has been featured extensively in television, print, and radio media and has been a commentator on Good Morning America, NPR, and CNN. He has been quoted in hundreds of magazines and newspapers including USA Today, New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times.

Elizabeth Englander, PhD

Dr. Englander graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with Phi Beta Kappa and High Honors, and completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Southern California as an All-University Merit Fellow. She was awarded a Presidential Fellowship to found and direct the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, which delivers free anti-violence and anti-bullying programs, resources, and research to K-12 Education. She was the Special Editor for the Cyberbullying issue of the Journal of Social Sciences, and has authored about a hundred articles in academic journals and books. Dr. Englander has been named the Chair of the Cyberbullying Work Group at the Institute for Digital Media and Child Development, which is supported by the National Academy of Sciences to help define the national research agenda concerning digital technology’s impact upon children’s development. She is the author of Understanding Violence, and of Bullying and Cyberbullying: A Guide for Educators, recently released by Harvard Press.