Meet the Speakers
Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, DO
Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, DO, Founder and President, Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development; Clinical Assistant Professor of Health Care Policy and Management, School of Health Technology and Management, Stony Brook Medicine
Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, DO
Dr. Pam Hurst-Della Pietra (pam@childrenandscreens.com) is the President of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, a nonprofit organization she founded in 2013 that is best known for stimulating a dialogue on the impact of digital media on children and adolescents. With a medical degree and a background in pediatrics, she has two objectives. The first is to promote objective, high-quality scientific research (by making grants, identifying and nurturing talent, and fostering bold interdisciplinary collaborations). The second is to empower parents, teachers, clinicians, and policymakers with actionable information – about what we know and what we don’t – with which they can maximize children’s benefits from digital media and minimize their risks. Her ultimate goal is to provide all interested parties – parents, clinicians, educators, parents, policymakers, manufacturers, and children themselves – with the credible data they need to make good decisions about digital media.
Justine Cassell, PhD
Justine Cassell, PhD, Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact, the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Co-Director of the Yahoo-CMU InMind partnership on the future of personal assistants
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 her research has come to address not just technological innovation, but also 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. She has discovered the role that an ECA - or virtual peer - can play in children’s lives, as peer support for learning language, literacy skills, science and math. Cassell has also employed linguistic and psychological analyses to look at the effects of online conversation among a particularly diverse group of young people on their self-esteem, self-efficacy, and sense of community.
James Griffin, PhD
James Griffin, PhD, Deputy Chief of the Child Development & Behavior Branch, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health; Director of the Early Learning and School Readiness Program
James Griffin, PhD
James A. Griffin, Ph.D., is the Deputy Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch (CDBB) at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as the Director of the Early Learning and School Readiness Program. Prior to his position at NICHD, Dr. Griffin was a Senior Research Analyst in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education. He also served as the Assistant Director for the Social, Behavioral, and Education (SBE) Sciences in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and as a Research Analyst at the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF).
Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH
Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH, George Adkins Professor of Pediatrics, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, Adjunct Professor of Health Services, University of Washington; Director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development; Seattle Children’s Research Institute; Attending Pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital; Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Pediatrics
Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH
A pediatrician, researcher, and parent, Dimitri Christakis, is the George Adkins Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington, Director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and an attending pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Professor Christakis graduated from Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is the author of over 200 original research articles, a textbook of pediatrics and The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television work for your kids. (September 2006; Rodale). In 2010 he was awarded the Academic Pediatric Association Research Award for outstanding contributions to pediatric research over his career. His passion is developing actionable strategies to optimize the cognitive, emotional, and social development of preschool children. The pursuit of that passion has taken him from the exam room, to the community and most recently to cages of newborn mice. Christakis’ laboratory focuses on the effects of early environmental influences on child health and development and his work has been featured on all major international news outlets as well as all major national and international newspapers. He speaks frequently to international audiences of pediatricians, parents, educators and policy makers about the impact of early learning on brain development. He has served on the advisory board of Children and Screens since 2015.
Heather Kirkorian, PhD
Heather Kirkorian, PhD, Laura M. Secord Chair in Early Childhood Development, Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Heather Kirkorian, PhD
Heather 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. Heather's 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. 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 Coyne, PhD
Sarah Coyne, PhD, Associate Professor of Human Development in the School of Family Life, Brigham Young University
Sarah Coyne, PhD
Dr. Sarah M. Coyne is an associate professor of human development in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. She received her BSc degree in Psychology from Utah State University, and her PhD in Psychology from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England. Her research interests involve media, aggression, gender, and child development. Dr. Coyne has nearly 100 publications on these and other topics. She has 5 young children and currently lives in Salem, Utah.
Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, PhD
Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, PhD, the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow, Department of Psychology, Temple University; Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, PhD
Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research examines the development of early language and literacy as well as the role of play in learning. With her long-term collaborator, Roberta Golinkoff, she is author of 14 books and hundreds of publications, she is the recipient of the AERA Outstanding Public Communication for Education Research Award, the American Psychological Association’s Bronfenbrenner Award, the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science, the Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Award, the Society for Research in Child Development, Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development Award and the APA Distinguished Lecturer Award.
Trisha Prabhu
Trisha Prabhu, Founder & CEO of ReThink; Student at Harvard University
Trisha Prabhu
Trisha Prabhu is an 18-year-old innovator and Founder & CEO of ReThink, a social enterprise that's working to end online hate and make the Internet a safer place. Spurred to action by the cyberbullying-related suicide of a 12-year-old girl, Trisha invented a proactive solution, ReThink: an award-winning, patented technology solution that detects and stops online hate before it occurs. Trisha’s work has been recognized by The White House, Google, MIT, and WebMD, and featured on ABC's Shark Tank, and TED/TEDx stages. At President Obama’s invitation, Trisha was selected as one of few entrepreneurs in the world to attend the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University. ReThink works closely with the U.S. State Department's ShareAmerica program, and as a result, ReThink is now available in 3 languages and has reached over 5.5 million students and 1400 schools world-wide. In 2017, Trisha was elected the first female Youth Governor of Illinois in 28 years. In the fall of 2018, she will be pursuing an undergraduate degree at Harvard University and continue her passion for innovation at the intersection of technology and society to make the world a better place.
Jennifer Stevens Aubrey
Ph.D., University of Michigan
Jennifer Stevens Aubrey
Dr. Jennifer Stevens Aubrey (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2004) teaches classes on media, mass communication theory, and child and adolescent development in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona. With an emphasis on gender and child/adolescent development, her research focuses on media effects on emotional, mental, and physical health in young people. Topically, her research tends to centers on issues related to sexuality and body image. Her research has been published in such top-tier journals as Health Communication, Media Psychology, and Journal of Communication.
Larry Rosen, PhD
Larry Rosen, PhD, Professor Emeritus and Past Chair of the Psychology Department, California State University, Dominguez Hills
Larry Rosen, PhD
Dr. Larry Rosen is Professor Emeritus 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 neuropsychology, and is recognized as an international expert in the "Psychology of Technology." Over the past 30-plus years, Dr. Rosen and his colleagues have examined reactions to technology among more than 70,000 people in the United States and in 22 other countries. His latest book, “The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World” (MIT Press, 2016), has generated strong public interest and has been quoted in dozens of media outlets. Dr. Rosen has been featured extensively in television, print, and radio media and has been a commentator on 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, Good Morning America, NPR, and CNN
Linda Charmaraman, PhD
Linda Charmaraman, PhD, Wellesley Centers for Women, Project Director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Research Lab, Wellesley College
Linda Charmaraman, PhD
Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and a former National Institutes of Child and Human Development (NICHD) T32 postdoctoral research fellow at WCW. Recently, she was named Project Director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Research Lab. In addition to her research interests in adolescent identity, agency, and civic engagement, she has emerging interests in developing culturally-inclusive online health interventions for vulnerable adolescents and young adults, particularly racial/ethnic and sexual minority populations.
Emily Weinstein, EdD
Emily Weinstein, EdD, Postdoctoral Fellow at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Emily Weinstein, EdD
Emily Weinstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research examines how social technologies shape and re-shape the social, emotional, and civic lives of adolescents and young adults.
Paul Weigle, MD
Paul Weigle, MD, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Associate Medical Director of Outpatient Programs and Medical Staff President at Natchaug Hospital; Co-Chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Media Committee
Paul Weigle, MD
Dr. Weigle is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and the Associate Medical Director of Outpatient Programs and Medical Staff President at Natchaug Hospital. He specializes in the effects of computer habits on the mental health of youth, and regularly teaches on the topic at national meetings and on Connecticut news programs. Dr. Weigle has authored numerous scientific articles on the subject, most recently he edited and contributed for April’s special issue of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America entitled “Youth Internet Habits and Mental Health.” He is co-chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Media Committee, having served on the committee for over 15 years. He serves on the National Scientific Advisory Board for Children and Screens’ Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, and teaches on the clinical staff of Quinnipiac Medical School and UConn’s school of medicine.
Thomas Joiner, PhD
Thomas Joiner, PhD, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, Director of the Laboratory for the Study and Prevention of Suicide-Related Conditions and Behaviors, Florida State University; Editor-in-Chief of Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior
Thomas Joiner, PhD
THOMAS JOINER went to college at Princeton and received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is The Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University (FSU). Dr. Joiner’s work is on the psychology, neurobiology, and treatment of suicidal behavior and related conditions. Author of over 625 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Joiner is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. He received the Dublin Award for career achievement in suicide research from the American Association of Suicidology, as well as research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and Department of Defense (DoD). The Lawton Professorship and the Dublin Award are the single highest honors bestowed, respectively, by FSU and the American Association of Suicidology. In 2017, he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ethan Kross, PhD
Ethan Kross, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Director of the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory, University of Michigan
Ethan Kross, PhD
Ethan Kross, PhD is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan and the Director of the University of Michigan Self-Control and Emotion Laboratory. His research examines how people can control their emotions to improve our understanding of how self-control works, and to discover ways of enhancing self-control in everyday life. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and attended the University of Pennsylvania where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. Following his time at Penn, Ethan enrolled in Columbia University’s Psychology PhD program where he was supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Mental Health. After earning his PhD, he completed a one-year post-doctoral fellowship in social-affective neuroscience to learn about the neural systems that support self-control. He is the recipient of early career awards from the Association for Psychological Science, Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology as well as multiple teaching awards from the University of Michigan.
Vicky Rideout, MA
Vicky Rideout, MA, Founder, VJR Consulting
Vicky Rideout, MA
The firm is run by Vicky Rideout, a veteran Foundation executive, non-profit program director, and political aide whose career has run the gamut from working with then-State Senator Barack Obama on his historic speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention, to winning an Emmy Award with MTV for most effective public service campaign. In addition to being covered in the popular press, her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Pediatrics, and the Journal of Marketing and Public Policy (where she received the Thomas Kinnear Award recognizing the article that “makes the most significant contribution to the understanding of marketing and public policy issues within the most recent three-year period). Ms. Rideout founded VJR Consulting in 2010, and since then the firm's clients have included Northwestern University's Center on Media and Human Development, Common Sense Media, the Joyful Heart Foundation, Cartoon Network, Hope Lab, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and many others.
Sherry Emery, PhD
Sherry Emery, PhD, Senior Fellow of Public Health, The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago
Sherry Emery, PhD
Sherry L. Emery is a senior fellow of public health at the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. Before joining NORC with her team in July 2016, Emery was a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy (IHRP), where she established and directed the Health Media Collaboratory in 2011. She was an IHRP Fellow and a research associate professor in the UIC Department of Economics. Emery's interdisciplinary research applies the approaches of health communication, economics, and public policy to understand how both traditional and new media influence health behavior. For over a decade, she focused primarily on the roles that tobacco control and other tobacco-related advertising play in shaping attitudes, beliefs, and tobacco-use behaviors among youth and adults. Since 2010, her research scope has expanded to include examinations of the impact of anti-drug and anti-obesity media campaigns, as well how pharmaceutical advertising affects health care utilization.
Jennifer Manganello, PhD, MPH
Jennifer Manganello, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor, University at Albany School of Public Health
Jennifer Manganello, PhD, MPH
Jennifer Manganello is an Associate Professor at the University at Albany School of Public Health. She is a health communication scholar who incorporates theories, concepts, and methods from the fields of public health and communication. Her research focuses on health literacy as well as the effects of media on attitudes, behaviors, and policies that put young people (children, adolescents, young adults) at risk for negative health outcomes. She has applied a broad range of skills and methodologies (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods) to conduct both primary data collection and secondary data analysis. She has published her work in journals such as the Journal of Health Communication, Public Health Management and Practice, Journal of Children and Media, and Public Health Nutrition. Before starting at UAlbany, Dr. Manganello was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
John Silva
John Silva, MEd, NBCT, The News Literacy Project
John Silva
John Silva is the News Literacy Project’s director of education and a National Board Certified Teacher with 13 years of experience as a middle and high school social studies teacher with Chicago Public Schools. As part of the NLP education team, John develops learning programs and professional development for educators to teach students to sort fact from fiction, to become critical consumers of news and information and to be active, engaged citizens in today’s complex information landscape.
Jakki Bailey, PhD
Jakki Bailey, PhD, Assistant Professor and the Scott C. and Vickie S. Reeve Endowed Faculty Fellow, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin
Jakki Bailey, PhD
Jakki Bailey is an Assistant Professor and the Scott C. and Vickie S. Reeve Endowed Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in the School of Information. She specializes in immersive media, and its influence on cognition, behavior, and learning. Bailey examines the psychological implications of immersive virtual reality (VR) on child development, and is currently studying VR’s influence on children’s cognitive skills and social responses. Her past research has included studying how technology affects behavior change such as through Internet-based programs to reduce the risk of mental disorders and leveraging VR to promote pro-environmental behaviors among adult populations. In addition, she has used VR to test some of the mechanisms behind embodiment’s influence on perception. In addition to her academic research and service, Bailey has advised children’s media company executives on the psychological, social, and ethical implications of VR in youth’s lives. She has completed her Ph.D. in Communication at Stanford University, and was the recipient of the 2016-2017 Sesame Workshop Dissertation Award and the 2018 Nathan Maccoby Dissertation Award.
Patricia Greenfield, PhD
Patricia Greenfield, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at University of California Los Angeles, Director of Children’s Digital Media Center at Los Angeles
Patricia Greenfield, PhD
Patricia Greenfield received her Ph. D. from Harvard University and is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA, where she is a member of the Developmental Psychology group. Her central theoretical and research interest is in the relationship between culture and human development. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Behavioral Science Research, the APA Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society, and the SRCD award for Distinguished Contributions to Cultural and Contextual Factors in Child Development.
Rachel Severson, PhD
Rachel Severson, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Director of the Minds Laboratory, University of Montana
Rachel Severson, PhD
Dr. Rachel Severson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Montana. She received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from University of Washington and was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Oslo and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Severson is Director of the Minds Lab, where she and her research team investigate how children attribute minds and internal states to human and non-human others (non-human animals, inanimate nature, and personified technologies, such as robots) and the social and moral consequences of doing so.
Mark Mon Williams, PhD
Mark Mon Williams, PhD, Chair in Cognitive Psychology, University of Leeds School of Psychology, UK; Professor of Psychology, Bradford Institute of Health Research; Professor of Paediatric Vision, Norwegian Centre for Vision
Mark Mon Williams, PhD
Professor Mark Mon-Williams (MMW) holds a Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Leeds, and is Professor of Psychology at the Bradford Institute of Health Research and Professor of Paediatric Vision at The Norwegian Centre for Vision. 25 years ago, MMW made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the sensorimotor impact of Virtual Reality (work that was headline news around the world). He is now leading the creation of a Centre for Immersive Technologies at the University of Leeds (being launched in November 2018) – with Immersive Technologies being a major research priority for the University. MMW is also the head of the Centre of Applied Education Research (a partnership between the Universities of Leeds and Bradford together with the Department for Education, the Education Endowment Foundation, and the Bradford Local Authority) – a multidisciplinary Centre based at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.
Elizabeth Englander, PhD
Elizabeth Englander, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Founder of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, Bridgewater State University
Elizabeth Englander, PhD
Elizabeth Kandel Englander is a professor of Psychology and the founder and Director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University, a Center which delivers programs, resources, and research for the state of Massachusetts and nationwide. She is a nationally recognized researcher and expert in the area of bullying and cyberbullying, childhood causes of aggression and abuse, and children’s use of technology. She was named Most Valuable Educator of 2013 by the Boston Red Sox because of her work in technological aggression and how it interacts with peer abusiveness in general. Dr. Englander was a Nominee for the 2015 National Crime Victims’ Service Award and is the Chair of the Cyberbullying Workgroup for the Institute of Child Development and Digital Media, collaborating with the National Academy of Sciences. Each year Dr. Englander trains and supervises graduate and undergraduate students and collaborates with multiple agencies around the State of Massachusetts and across the nation.
Dorothy Espelage, PhD
Dorothy Espelage, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of Florida
Dorothy Espelage, PhD
Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida. She is the recipient of the APA Lifetime Achievement Award in Prevention Science and the 2016 APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy, and is a Fellow of APS, APA, and AERA. She was just elected to the National Academy of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Indiana University in 1997. Over the last 22 years, she has authored over 200 peer- reviewed articles, six edited books, and 70 chapters on bullying, homophobic teasing, sexual harassment, dating violence, and gang violence. Her research focuses on translating empirical findings into prevention and intervention programming and she has secured over eleven million dollars of external funding. She advises members of Congress and Senate on bully prevention legislation. She conducts regular webinars for CDC, NIH, and NIJ to disseminate research.
Sara Konrath, PhD
Sara Konrath, PhD, Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies, Director of the Interdisciplinary Program on Empathy and Altruism Research, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University
Sara Konrath, PhD
Sara Konrath is a social psychologist (University of Michigan, 2007) who directs the Interdisciplinary Program on Empathy and Altruism Research (iPEARlab.org), a research lab that focuses on prosocial traits, motivations, and behaviors. Her research examines societal changes in empathy and narcissism, and implications of these for the self (e.g. health, well-being) and others (e.g. prosocial behavior). Her current work involves developing and testing evidence-based mobile phone empathy-building programs. Konrath is an Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Tijana Milosevic, PhD
Tijana Milosevic, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway
Tijana Milosevic, PhD
Tijana Milosevic is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo focusing on social media policies, internet governance, and digital media use among children and youth. She is a member of the EU Kids Online research network. Her first monograph "Protecting Children Online? Cyberbullying Policies of Social Media Companies" has just been published in The MIT Press Information Society Series. Tijana is originally from Belgrade, Serbia, and completed her PhD at American University in Washington DC’s School of Communication. Milosevic obtained her MA in Media and Public Affairs from The George Washington University, also in DC. In her book, Tijana provides an analysis of policies and mechanisms that social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, among others, have in place to address digital bullying. She raises the questions about effectiveness of the current self-regulatory environment and what it takes to create a space for more dignified online relations. She has also studied media coverage of cyberbullying in the US mainstream media and have previously conducted work on a range of topics from media coverage of War in Iraq to climate change, public diplomacy, and the effect on copyright policies on visual arts community in the US. Her works have appeared in the Journal of Children and Media, New Media & Society and Public Understanding of Science, among others.
Doug Gentile, PhD
Douglas Gentile, PhD, Professor of Developmental Psychology, Director of the Media Research Laboratory, Iowa State University
Doug Gentile, PhD
Dr. Douglas Gentile, PhD, is an award-winning research scientist, educator, author, and is professor of developmental psychology at Iowa State University. His experience includes over 30 years conducting research with children and adults. He is the editor of the book Media Violence and Children (2 editions; 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 over 100 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.
Craig Anderson, PhD
Craig Anderson, PhD, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence, Iowa State University
Craig Anderson, PhD
Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., Stanford University, 1980, is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University; Director, Center for the Study of Violence; and Past-President of the International Society for Research on Aggression. His 240+ publications have received over 37,000 citations. His book Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents included the first longitudinal study of this topic, and the first experimental study to compare the short-term effects of violent children’s video games on the aggressive behavior of both children and college students. He is considered by many to be the world's leading expert on violent video game effects. His General Aggression Model has been applied to clinical, social, personality and developmental psychology; pediatrics; criminology; war and climate change, among other fields. In 2017 Dr. Anderson received the Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Psychological Issues, its top award. It was presented for "outstanding contributions to the development and integration of psychological research and social action."
Sandra Calvert, PhD
Sandra Calvert, PhD, Developmental and Child Psychologist; Director of the Children’s Media Center, Georgetown University, Affiliated Faculty Member at the McCourt School of Public Policy
Sandra Calvert, PhD
Sandra L. Calvert is a developmental and child psychologist, whose scholarship illuminates the children's media area, including policy implications. Dr. Calvert is currently Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, an affiliated faculty member at the McCourt School of Public Policy, and the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the International Communication Association. Dr. Calvert has authored seven books and more than 100 articles and book chapters. Her current research, funded by the National Science Foundation, studies the effects of children's relationships with media characters on math skills, including the creation of an intelligent character prototype that can respond contingently to children’s performance on math problems. She has served on two committees for the National Academies: one on food marketing and obesity, and the other on protecting our children from online pornography; on a task force for the American Psychological Association examining the impact of exposure to video game violence on youth aggression; given testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about the Children’s Television Act; and served as a consultant for numerous companies to improve the quality of children’s media.
Tom Hummer, PhD
Tom Hummer, PhD, Assistant Research Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine
Tom Hummer, PhD
Dr. Hummer is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Before coming to Indianapolis, he received his undergraduate degree in psychology from the Ohio State University and a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Chicago. He has been at IUSM since 2010, when he joined a team using neuroimaging to examine how media violence exposure affects the brain. Since that time, he has utilized neuropsychological, behavioral, and neuroimaging tools to examine how different forms of digital media use impact brain structure and function, particularly during childhood and adolescence. He also employs neuroimaging to examine adolescent risky decision-making in areas such as substance use and sexual behavior. His recent work has focused on examining virtual reality as a tool to address childhood aggression. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time coaching soccer, running, wrestling with his dog, and playing Legos with his children.
Dillon Browne
Dillon Browne, Psychology, University of Waterloo, Canada
Dillon Browne
Dr. Dillon Browne is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Waterloo. He completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Toronto and has written numerous articles in the domains of children’s mental health, human development, and family studies. Dillon enjoys playing the guitar and piano, cycling, and fitness.
Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Ph.D
Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh
Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Ph.D
Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research examines interpersonal and sociocultural influences on adolescent and emerging adult development, with a focus on gender, social media, sexuality, body image, and mental health. Using an interdisciplinary framework in her research on adolescent social media use, she collaborates with scholars from psychiatry, education, and computer science. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an A.B. degree in Psychology from Brown University. Before joining the Pitt Psychology faculty in 2017, she completed a pre-doctoral clinical internship and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.
Meredith Gansner
Meredith Gansner, Psychiatry Fellow, Cambridge Health Alliance
Meredith Gansner
Meredith Gansner is a second-year child psychiatry fellow at Cambridge Health Alliance. She attended Williams College for her undergraduate degree and received her M.D. from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. She completed her psychiatry residency at the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Training Program in Boston, where she was awarded the Henry G. Altman Award for Excellence in Medical Education and was a semi-finalist for the Solomon Award at Harvard Psychiatry Research Day for her research project on media use in adolescents with psychiatric illness. She has presented her research in both medical education and adolescent media use nationally at conferences, and will be presenting about the incorporation of adolescent media use in formulating a psychiatric safety assessment at the 2018 AACAP conference. In addition to academic publications, she also has published pieces concerning media and child psychiatry in Psychiatric Times and Slate magazines.
Sheri Madigan
Dr. Sheri Madigan, Clinical Psychologist
Sheri Madigan
Dr. Sheri Madigan is a clinical psychologist and holds a Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute. The overarching goal of her research is to isolate which key factors, or which combination of factors present in early childhood, are most predictive of children embarking on a successful versus an unsuccessful developmental pathway. Her work has been widely covered in the news media, including The New York Times, Time, CNN, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Teresia O’Connor, MD, MPH
Teresia O’Connor, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center and Section of Public Health and Primary Care, Baylor College of Medicine
Teresia O’Connor, MD, MPH
Teresia O’Connor, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center and Section of Public Health and Primary Care at Baylor College of Medicine. She received her medical degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1999 and completed internship and residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in Academic General Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine. She received a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, with a special concentration on Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences. She is board certified in General Pediatrics and is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Society for Pediatric Research. She is a NIH funded researcher with a research focus on identifying strategies to best prevent and treat childhood obesity; providing better understanding of how fathers and mothers influence their children’s obesity-related behaviors; and assessing how to use technology to improve the measurement of children’s obesity-related behaviors.
Karen F. Heffler, MD
Karen Helffer, Ophthalmology, Drexel University College of Medicine
Karen F. Heffler, MD
Karen F. Heffler, MD is a researcher at Drexel University with primary interest in the effects of early digital media exposure on child development. She has extensively reviewed the literature on autism spectrum disorder, parent-child interactions, effects of digital media on child development, early post-natal brain development, neuroplasticity and atypical brain development in ASD. Her findings inform her research. Along with colleagues at Drexel, she is researching experiential factors including early digital media use and developmental outcomes. Dr. Heffler also studies digital media and social time in young children with ASD and subsequent autism symptoms, developmental findings, sleep and parental stress.
Travis Saunders
Travis Saunders, Applied Human Sciences, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
Travis Saunders
Travis Saunders is an Assistant Professor and the Jeanne and J.-Louis Lévesque Research Professor in Nutrisciences and Health at the University of Prince Edward Island. His research investigates the relationships between sedentary behaviour, physical activity, and health across the lifespan.
Tim Smith
Tim Smith, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, London, UK
Tim Smith
Tim Smith is a Reader in Cognitive Psychology, head of the Cognition in Naturalistic Environments Lab at Birkbeck, University of London and a member of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. His lab studies the factors that influence how to actively process naturalistic audiovisual scenes, such as stimulus features, higher-order cognition and individual differences and how these cognitive processes develop over the first few years of life. He has authored 70+ scientific articles, multiple software packages for analysis of naturalistic eye movement data, is a board member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) and the co-editor of the journal Projections.
Clifford Sussman, MD
Clifford Sussman, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist; George Washington University, Washington, DC
Clifford Sussman, MD
Clifford Sussman, MD has a private practice in psychiatry for children, adolescents, and young adults in Washington, DC. He has been featured as an expert on Internet Gaming Disorder in the New York Times and TIME Magazine for Kids. His guide to healthy technology use for ADHD was featured on the cover of Attention Magazine. As an author of peer-reviewed literature and a frequent public speaker, he is internationally known as a pioneer in using psychotherapy to treat internet and video game addiction. He is dedicated to helping people achieve a more balanced relationship with digital technology. Dr. Sussman completed an adult psychiatry residency at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, PA, and a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Dr. Sussman has over 10 years of experience treating digital addictions. He also treats patients with comorbid conditions, such as ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Website: www.cliffordsussmanmd.com
Anissa Abi-Dargham, MD
Department of Psychiatry, Stony Brook University
Anissa Abi-Dargham, MD
Anissa Abi-Dargham is an expert in areas of molecular imaging, pharmacology, schizophrenia and addiction. Dr. Abi-Dargham employs the use of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging to study the neurobiology of schizophrenia and mental illnesses. Her research has resulted in seminal findings describing the complex alterations of dopamine transmission in schizophrenia and their relationship to clinical symptoms, cognition and response to treatment. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Marc Potenza, MD, PhD
Marc Potenza, PhD, MD, Psychiatrist; Professor of Psychiatry, Child Study, and Neuroscience, Director of the Problem Gambling Clinic, the Center of Excellence in Gambling Research, and the Women and Addictive Disorders Core of Women’s Health Research, Yale University School of Medicine; Editor-in-Chief of Current Addiction Reports
Marc Potenza, MD, PhD
Dr. Potenza is a board-certified psychiatrist with sub-specialty training and certification in addiction psychiatry. He has trained at Yale University receiving a combined BS/MS with Honors in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics and a PhD in Cell Biology, the latter concurrent with the MD through the Medical Scientist Training Program. He completed internship, psychiatric residency, and addiction psychiatry fellowship training at Yale. Currently, he is a Professor of Psychiatry, Child Study and Neuroscience at the Yale University School of Medicine where he is Director of the Problem Gambling Clinic, the Center of Excellence in Gambling Research, and the Women and Addictive Disorders Core of Women's Health Research at Yale. He is on the editorial boards of fifteen journals including being editor-in-chief of Current Addiction Reports and has received multiple national and international awards for excellence in research and clinical care. He has consulted to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Registry of Effective Programs, National Institutes of Health, American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization on matters of addiction.
Guilherme Borges, ScD
Guilherme Borges, ScD, Psychologist, Senior Researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatria, Mexico, and professor in programs at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma, Mexico
Guilherme Borges, ScD
Guilherme Borges is a Psychologist with a doctoral affiliation at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and postdoctoral affiliation at Harvard Medical School. A senior researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatria (Mexico) and professor in programs at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), he has mentored 41 students and published 363 articles and book chapters. His areas of expertise are alcohol and drugs and how they related to injuries and suicide, psychiatric nosology and the role of immigration on mental health. Guilherme served as a member of the DSM-5 and is a member of WHO Reference Group on Alcohol and Drug use Epidemiology. He has received several awards, including the “Jellinek Memorial Fund Award” (epidemiology, 2015).
Hans-Jürgen Rumpf, PhD
Hans-Jürgen Rumpf, PhD, Psychologist, Head of the Research Group S:TEP (Substance abuse: Treatment, Epidemiology and Prevention), Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Lübeck, Germany
Hans-Jürgen Rumpf, PhD
PD Dr. Hans-Jürgen Rumpf is a psychologist and the head of the Research Group S:TEP (Substance abuse: Treatment, Epidemiology and Prevention) at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Lübeck, Germany. His research covers studies on epidemiology of substance-related and other mental disorders as well as behavioral addictions. In addition, he is engaged in studies on brief interventions in the alcohol and tobacco field as well as for Internet Addiction. He has published 390 articles in scientific journals. From 2014 to 2016, he was president of the German Society of Addiction Research and Addiction Treatment and holds now the position of the Past-President. He has worked as an expert for the WHO in groups related to the development of ICD-11, particularly in the field of behavioral addictions.
Matthias Brand, PhD
Matthias Brand, PhD, Professor of General Psychology: Cognition, Director of the Center for Behavioral Addiction Research, Director of the Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Matthias Brand, PhD
Matthias Brand is full professor of General Psychology: Cognition at University Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He is also director of the Center for Behavioral Addiction Research (CeBAR), University Duisburg-Essen, Germany and director of the Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Essen, Germany. His research interests concentrate on neurobiological and psychological mechanisms underlying behavioral addictions with a focus on specific Internet-use disorders, such as gaming disorder, social-networking addiction, Internet-pornography-use disorder and Internet-shopping disorder. Matthias has published more than 150 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, including theoretical articles that describe the development and maintenance of Internet-use disorders, for example the internationally acknowledged Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model. Matthias has a diploma in psychology and a PhD in psychology. He is board member of the International Society for the Studies of Behavioral Addictions and associate editor of several journals, such as the Journal of Behavioral Addictions.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD, LCSW-R
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD, LCSW-R, Founder/Chief Clinical Officer of Launch House Digital Detox & Wellness Center and Maui Recovery, Author of "Glow Kids," and former Clinical Professor Stony Brook Medicine
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD, LCSW-R
Dr. Kardaras is an Ivy-League educated psychologist, an internationally renowned speaker, and one of the country’s foremost addiction experts. A former Clinical Professor at Stony Brook Medicine where he specialized in teaching the neurophysiology and treatment of addiction, he has also taught neuropsychology at the doctoral-level. He is currently the CEO and Founder of Maui Recovery in Hawaii; Omega Recovery in Austin, Texas; and the Launch House in the Hamptons, New York. Considered a leading expert on young people and digital addiction, he has treated over 2,000 teens over the past 20 years and has appeared on ABC’s 20/20, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, FOX & Friends, NPR, Good Day New York and has written about screen addiction for TIME Magazine, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Salon, and The NY Post. He is also the author of “Glow Kids” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), the seminal book on the clinical, neurological and sociological aspects of Tech Addiction (Smart Phones, Video Games, Social Media, etc.), which has been translated into nine languages.
Hilarie Cash, PhD, LMHC
Hilarie Cash, PhD, LMHC, Co-founder of Internet/Computer Addiction Services, Co-Developer of reSTART Center for Digital Technology Sustainability’s Video Game and Internet Treatment Program
Hilarie Cash, PhD, LMHC
Co-founder of Internet/Computer Addiction Services and co-developer of reSTART's Video Game and Internet Treatment Program. Hilarie is a speaker, teacher, and author and has appeared, among other places, on ABC News, CNN, NPR, PBS, the BBC, and in print in the Seattle Times, U.S.A. Today, U.S. News and World Report, and the New York Times.
Young-Sam Koh, PhD
Young-Sam Koh, PhD, Professor of Liberal Arts, College of General Education, Tongmyong University; Former leader of the Internet Addiction Response Center in Korea
Young-Sam Koh, PhD
Young-Sam Koh is a professor of liberal arts at Tongmyung University in Korea since 2017. He is interested in the impact of new technology on human and human life. He notes that recent technologies such as AI(artificial intelligence), IoT(Internet of things) and VR(virtual reality) are fundamentally changing human lifestyles. He is the founder of the 4th Industrial Revolution Research Center of the University. The Center is developing digital convergence technology that prevents aging and supports the daily life of the elderly. Professor Koh has been leading the Internet Addiction Response Center in Korea for more than 10 years until 2017. The Center is a government agency in Korea that prevents and heals smartphone addiction. The Center conducts annual surveys of smartphone addicts and reflects them on national policy. And the center nurtures professional counselors and develops healing programs. Currently Professor Koh has a significant influence on the Korean government's policy on smartphone addiction. He proposed that the Korean government use the term 'over-dependence' instead of 'addiction' in the problematic use of smartphones, and the Korean government accepted it. By using these terms now, the Korean government seeks to strengthen the positive relationship between humans and technology, rather than seriously labeling problematic use as "addiction."
Klaus Wölfling, PhD
Klaus Wölfling, PhD, Psychological Head of the Outpatient Clinic for Behavioral Addiction, Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany
Klaus Wölfling, PhD
Klaus Wölfling, born in 1971, completed a degree in psychology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2008 he became the psychological head of the Outpatient Clinic for Behavioral Addiction, Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. As part of his research into non-substance-related addictions, Wölfling has carried out several studies on the subject of computer game addiction and its similarity with drug addiction.
Brad Bushman, PhD
Brad Bushman, PhD, Professor of Communication and Psychology, Ohio State University School of Communication
Brad Bushman, PhD
Brad J. Bushman is a Professor of Communication and Psychology at The Ohio State University. For over 30 years he has studied the causes, consequences, and solutions to the problem of human aggression and violence. He was a member of President Obama’s committee on gun violence, and he has testified before the U.S. Congress about youth violence. He has over 200 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited over 35,000 times.
Lauren Hale, PhD
Lauren Hale, PhD, Professor of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine, Stony Brook University; Editor-in-Chief of Sleep Health
Lauren Hale, PhD
Lauren Hale, PhD, (Professor of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine, Stony Brook University; Core Faculty, Program in Public Health; PhD, Princeton University) studies the social patterning of sleep and how it contributes to growing inequalities in health and well-being. With funding from NICHD, NIDDK, NHLBI, and NIA, she analyzes demographic, behavioral, and neighborhood data from large-scale studies to understand how they relate to sleep and well-being in children, adolescents, adults, and aging populations. Dr. Hale has published over 80 published peer-reviewed articles in Sleep, Sleep Health, Sleep Medicine Reviews, Pediatrics, JAMA Pediatrics, among numerous other peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Hale also serves on the Board of Directors for the National Sleep Foundation and is the Editor-in-Chief of Sleep Health.
Cordelia Carter, MD
Cordelia Carter, MD, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, New York University School of Medicine, Director of the NYU-Langone Health Women’s Sports Center; Program Director for Pediatric Sports Medicine, Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital
Cordelia Carter, MD
Cordelia Carter, MD, recently joined the faculty of NYU School of Medicine in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery as the director of the NYU-Langone Health Women’s Sports Center and program director for Pediatric Sports Medicine at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital. Prior to this appointment, she spent five years on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor of Pediatric Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine. Carter has had a lifelong interest in sports medicine: in addition to her own participation in athletics as an Academic All-American collegiate field hockey player, she has coached lacrosse, track and field, and field hockey teams at a wide range of levels. She is currently team physician for the Connecticut Whale of the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) and has previously been a team physician for Yale Athletics and a physician for the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA)-sponsored Connecticut Open.
Monique LeBourgeois, PhD
Monique LeBourgeois, PhD, Associate Professor of Integrative Physiology, Sleep and Development Laboratory, University of Colorado Boulder
Monique LeBourgeois, PhD
Dr. LeBourgeois is Associate Professor of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Broadly, her research focuses on the intimate intertwining between the sleeping brain and health during early childhood. One line of research longitudinally examines developmental changes in sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythms across early childhood. Another line uses experimental protocols to determine the health and developmental consequences of young children not sleeping enough or at the wrong circadian time. Her most recent work targets children experiencing chronic inadequate sleep to understand the effects of sleep extension on the neural substrates of emotion processing. Other collaborative lines of investigation involve large-scale studies of the social and demographic predictors of sleep, as well as relationships between sleep and health/developmental outcomes (e.g. asthma, obesity, emotion regulation, verbal ability) in at-risk children. The collective goal of this research is to develop an integrative longitudinal understanding of sleep-related brain and behavioral processes, which may uncover important points of entry for the prevention and treatment of mental illness and physical disease.
Tom Robinson, MPH, MD
Thomas Robinson, MPH, MD, Director of the Solutions Science Lab, Stanford University; Pediatrician, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
Tom Robinson, MPH, MD
Thomas Robinson designs solutions to improve the health and well-being of children, families, and the planet. Dr. Robinson originated the solution-oriented research paradigm and directs the Stanford Solutions Science Lab. He is known for his pioneering obesity prevention and treatment research, including the concept of stealth interventions. His research applies social cognitive models of behavior change to behavioral, social, environmental and policy interventions for children and families in real-world settings, making the results relevant for informing clinical and public health practice and policy. His research is largely experimental, conducting rigorous school-, family- and community-based randomized controlled trials. He studies obesity and disordered eating, nutrition, physical activity/inactivity and sedentary behavior, the effects of television and other screen time, adolescent smoking, aggressive behavior, consumerism, and behaviors to promote environmental sustainability. He is published widely in the scientific literature and a frequent appointee to expert and advisory panels for leading national and international scientific and public health agencies and organizations.
Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD
Karla Zadnik, PhD, OD, Dean of the College of Optometry, Glenn A. Fry Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics, Ohio State University
Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD
Karla Zadnik is the Dean of The Ohio State University College of Optometry where she is also the Glenn A. Fry Professor of Optometry and Physiological Optics. She is a 2010 Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State and serves as the Executive Dean for the Health Sciences there. She is the immediate past president of the Association of Schools and Colleges and is a member of the National Board of Examiners in Optometry’s Board of Directors. She received her OD and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley School of Optometry. She has chaired the Biomedical Sciences Institutional Review Board at Ohio State for the last 16 years. Professor Zadnik is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry, a diplomate in its Section on Cornea, Contact Lenses & Refractive Technologies, and served as the Academy’s President in 2011-12. Dr. Zadnik was the Study Chairman for the NEI-funded Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Ethnicity and Refractive Error (CLEERE) Study and chaired the first-ever NEI-funded multicenter study based in optometry, the Collaborative Longitudinal Evaluation of Keratoconus (CLEK) Study from 1994 through 2007.
Courtney Blackwell, PhD
Courtney Blackwell, PhD, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Social Sciences, Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine - Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program
Courtney Blackwell, PhD
Courtney K. Blackwell, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She is a developmental methodologist with expertise in survey development and scale validation, including child and parent proxy Person Reported Outcome (PRO) measures as well as population health surveys. Her research focuses on young children’s learning and positive health development, and the complex social environmental factors that contribute to such outcomes. Of particular interest is the developmental origins of well-being, including conceptualizing, identifying, and measuring early indicators of this construct, as well as ascertaining risk and promotive factors in the home and school environment. With a background in early childhood educational media and technology, Blackwell is also interested in the role that digital and interactive media plays in young children’s engagement in and approaches to learning, both of which are cornerstones for well-being.
Michael Robb, PhD
Michael Robb, PhD, Senior Director of Research, Common Sense Media
Michael Robb, PhD
Michael Robb is senior director of research at Common Sense, overseeing the research program, evaluation of organization impact, and program development research. Michael has been involved in issues involving media and children for over 15 years. He has published research on the impact of electronic media on young children's language development, early literacy outcomes, and problem-solving abilities in a variety of academic journals. Michael also has supervised community educational outreach efforts, helping parents and teachers make the most of quality children's programming. Michael received his B.A. from Tufts University and M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from UC Riverside.
Lindsay Squeglia, PhD
Lindsay Squeglia, PhD, Co-leader of Medical University of South Carolina’s site for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD), Co-Chair of the ABCD Mobile Technology Workgroup
Lindsay Squeglia, PhD
Dr. Lindsay Squeglia received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with a specialization in neuropsychology, at the San Diego State University/University of California San Diego (SDSU/UCSD) Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. She completed her clinical internship in neuropsychology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and her postdoctoral fellowship in neuroimaging at UCSD. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of alcohol and cannabis use on adolescent brain development, as well as creating effective treatment options for substance-using youth. She co-leads MUSC's site for the nationwide Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD) and is the co-chair of the ABCD Mobile Technology Workgroup. She has a strong interest in community outreach and education efforts and is a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of South Carolina. Dr. Squeglia is originally from South Carolina and grew up in the Charleston area. Before attending graduate school, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of South Carolina.
Florence Breslin, MS
Florence Breslin, Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Tulsa
Florence Breslin, MS
Florence Breslin, MS, CCRP is a co-Investigator at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research site of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Her research interest began in pre-clinical addiction research at the University of Virginia Center for Addition Education. She then moved into adult human neuroimaging research at the Center for Health Behavior Neuroscience at the University of Kansas Medical Center. The ABCD study allowed her to pursue her interests of brain development and function during addiction. Under her leadership the LIBR ABCD site was awarded an increase from 525 to 740 subjects, resulting in a $1.4million increase. In 2017 Florence was award the ABCD Staff Member of the Year by Nora Volkow, MD, Directory of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and George Koob, Ph.D., Directory of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for her contributions to ABCD both at LIBR and in the consortium. Her current research focuses on contextual factors, such as parenting and screen time, that influence adolescent brain development and mental health.
Kathleen Roskos
Kathleen Roskos, Education & School Psychology, John Carroll University
Kathleen Roskos
Kathleen A. Roskos is a Professor Emerita at John Carroll University, where she continues to teach/design online courses in literacy assessment/intervention and the language arts. She has conducted a range of quantitative and qualitative studies that address critical factors of literacy development; early literacy assessment and intervention in educational settings; literacy and play relationships; early childhood educator preparation and professional development; and more recently the role of e-books in early literacy development and learning. She has developed and coordinated a range of educational grants, including a DOD grant for military veterans entering teaching, Early Reading First grants, local and state literacy initiative grants and a Straight A Innovation grant. Her current research focuses on the design and effective use of e-books as teaching and learning tools that promote early literacy skills and reduce literacy risk in young children.
Nicole Zamanzadeh, Graduate Student
Nicole Zamanzadeh, Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Nicole Zamanzadeh, Graduate Student
Nicole Zamanzadeh is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research interests lie at the intersection of family communication, adolescents, technology, and stress, resilience, and thriving. Her current work investigates the effects of technology use habits such as media multitasking on the stress and resilience of adolescents and family units.
Adam Gazzaley, PhD
Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, Professor in Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry, Founder and Executive Director of Neuroscape, University of California San Francisco; Co-Founder and Chief Science Advisor of Akili Interactive; Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of JAZZ Venture Partners
Adam Gazzaley, PhD
Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor in Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry at UC San Francisco and the Founder & Executive Director of Neuroscape, a translational neuroscience center engaged in technology creation and scientific research of novel brain assessment and optimization approaches. Dr. Gazzaley is co-founder and Chief Science Advisor of Akili Interactive, a company developing therapeutic video games, and co-founder and Chief Scientist of JAZZ Venture Partners, a venture capital firm investing in experiential technology to improve human performance. He has been a scientific advisor for over a dozen companies including Apple, GE, Nielsen, Deloitte, Magic Leap, and the VOID. He has filed multiple patents, authored over 130 scientific articles, and delivered over 600 invited presentations around the world. He wrote and hosted the nationally-televised PBS special “The Distracted Mind with Dr. Adam Gazzaley”, and co-authored the 2016 MIT Press book “The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World”, winner of the 2017 PROSE Award. Dr. Gazzaley has received many awards and honors, including the 2015 Society for Neuroscience – Science Educator Award.
Matthew S. Cain, PhD
Matthew S. Cain, PhD, Research Psychologist, U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, & Engineering Center; Tufts Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Matthew S. Cain, PhD
Matthew S. Cain, PhD, Research Psychologist, U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, & Engineering Center; Tufts Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Matthew is a cognitive neuroscientist studying how human cognitive and perceptual performance is affected by context. Contextual effects can occur at many levels and he is interested not only in identifying contextual influences at a given level, but also in understanding how influences interact across levels. At the most immediate contextual level, he has examined the effects of the rules and responses used on previous experimental trials (e.g., post-error slowing; task switching) and the distribution of stimuli in experimental environments (e.g., multiple-target visual search and optimal foraging theory). At a slightly broader level, he is interested in factors like task-specific practice, vigilance, and motivation. At the broadest level, he is interested in the personality and expertise factors (i.e., individual differences) that participants bring with them to an experiment (e.g., personality traits like extroversion or impulsiveness; experiences with real-world activities like on-the-job training, playing video games, and consuming media). Matthew believes that a multi-level, multi-disciplinary approach is needed to truly understand human behavior in a complex world. As a research psychologist with the NSRDEC, he is studying questions of attentional capture, control, and engagement in both controlled laboratory environments and more applied field environments. In his ongoing collaboration with the Visual Attenion Lab at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he is studying multiple-target visual search and its connections with optimal foraging theory. Previously, as a postdoc in the Brown University Laboratory for Cognitive & Perceptual Learning he was investigating the interactions between sleep, reward, and perceptual learning using behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging methods. Before that, he was a postdoc in the Duke Visual Cognition Lab, and studied the effects of contexts such as anxiety, environmental statistics, specialized training, and media experience on visual search and visual attention.
Susanne Baumgartner, PhD
Susanne Baumgartner, PhD, Assistant Professor and Researcher, Amsterdam School of Communication Research, ASCoR, at the University of Amsterdam
Susanne Baumgartner, PhD
Susanne Baumgartner is Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, ASCoR, and the Center for Research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media, at the University of Amsterdam. She graduated cum laude (2008) from the University of Zurich, Switzerland where she studied Communication Science, Social Psychology and English Literature. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Amsterdam. Before starting her Ph.D in Amsterdam, she was involved in several research projects at the University of Zurich and at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. From October 2012 till August 2013 she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at ASCoR and since September 2013 as an assistant professor. Her main research focuses on the role of social media and mobile media technologies in the lives of adolescents and more specifically on the consequences of media multitasking for adolescent development.
Daphne Bavelier, PhD
Daphne Bavelier, PhD, Professor in the School of Psychology and Education Sciences, Director of the Brain and Learning Laboratory, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Daphne Bavelier, PhD
Daphne Bavelier is a professor in the school of Psychology and Education Sciences at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She obtained her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA and trained in human brain plasticity under Helen Neville at the Salk Institute. Her lab established that playing fast-paced, action-packed entertainment video games typically thought to be mind-numbing actually benefits several aspects of cognition. Exploiting this counter-intuitive finding, the Cognitive Neuroscience research team she now heads investigates how new media, such as video games, can be leveraged to foster learning and brain plasticity. She presented the popular TED Talk "Your brain on video games".
Jason Chein, PhD
Jason Chein, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Director of the Neurocognition Laboratory, Temple University
Jason Chein, PhD
Jason Chein, PhD is a Professor of Psychology (Brain & Cognitive Sciences Area) at Temple University, and the Director of the Temple University Brain Research & Imaging Center. Dr. Chein earned his PhD in cognitive psychology with a specialization in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh, and then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. Broadly, research in Dr. Chein’s laboratory uses functional neuroimaging techniques in combination with traditional behavioral measures and training studies to investigate the central machinery of the brain's executive control network, and to explore how this system changes over the course of adolescent development and in response to practiced and habitual behaviors (e.g, computerized training, technology use).
Steve Lee, PhD
Steve Lee, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychology, ADHD and Development Laboratory, University of California Los Angeles
Steve Lee, PhD
Steve S. Lee, Ph.D., is a child clinical psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. He is President of the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (SCCAP) and Secretary/Treasurer of the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (ISRCAP). His research employs prospective designs to characterize the etiology of ADHD and externalizing disorders, as well as their trajectories across development. Key constructs of interest include family factors (e.g., parenting), temperament, and outcomes such as conduct problems and alcohol/substance use disorders. Using both clinical and population-based samples, his work utilizes diverse research strategies ranging from observational coding of parent-child interaction to large scale meta-analytic reviews. Dr. Lee is also a consulting editor for Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, and Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
Tristan Harris, PhD
Tristan Harris, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO, The Center for Humane Technology
Tristan Harris, PhD
Tristan Harris has been called “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by the Atlantic magazine. He is co-founder and CEO of the non-profit Center for Humane Technology which aims to re-align technology with humanity. Previously, Tristan was a Design Ethicist at Google where he sounded the alarm about the threat posed by attention-seeking platforms and their impact on society– from rising loneliness to enabling the manipulation of elections. Rolling Stone named Tristan one of 25 People Shaping the World in 2017, and was named in Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 in 2018. His work has been featured on TED, 60 Minutes, Wall Street Journal, Real Time with Bill Maher, NYTimes, PBS NewsHour, Recode, The Atlantic, WIRED, Der Spiegel, The Economist, and many more. Tristan has briefed Heads of State, CEOs of technology companies, and international policymakers about how the attention economy shapes society. Based in San Francisco, he is also a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in Government, a Senior Fellow at Common Sense Media and an advisor to the Open Markets Institute.
Ryan Foley, Graduate Student
Ryan Foley, Graduate Student, University of Michigan
Ryan Foley, Graduate Student
Ryan Foley is a first year graduate student coming from the University of Michigan where he earned a B.A. with distinction and honors in psychology. His research interests include video game usage and related health and social outcomes, adolescent phone and media usage and its relationship to health and educational outcomes, and generally contributing to the knowledge base of problematic media usage in adolescents and adults. He is passionate about making a difference in individuals lives and has relevant clinical experience working in educational and medical settings.
Jessica Mendoza, Doctoral Candidate
Jessica Mendoza, Doctoral Candidate, University of Alabama
Jessica Mendoza, Doctoral Candidate
Jessica Mendoza is originally from Long Beach, California. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Experimental Psychology program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Under the mentorship of Dr. Beverly Roskos, she is studying the implications of nomophobia, also known as the situational anxiety stemming from the absence of one’s mobile device, and memory for environmental landmarks while navigating outdoors. Jessica completed her undergraduate work at California State University, Dominguez Hills where she worked alongside Drs. Larry D. Rosen and Louis Mark Carrier. This is where she began her pursuit of understanding how technology shapes human behavior and cognitive processes. Jessica will be the first in her family to graduate with a Ph.D. This accomplishment is what drives her to wholeheartedly reach out to students from under-served populations to make a difference in their lives. Fun fact about Jessica, when she is not working on research, she enjoys studying different languages. Aside from being a fluent speaker of Spanish, she also mastered spoken and written Italian and Portuguese through self-study.
Eric Dubow, PhD
Eric Dubow, PhD, Bowling Green State University; Editor of Developmental Psychology
Eric Dubow, PhD
Eric F. Dubow, PhD, is Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. His research interests include: the development of risk and protective factors in children's adjustment; the development and implementation of school-based intervention programs to enhance coping skills in handling stressful and traumatic events; the development of aggression over time and across generations; and effects of exposure to ethnic-political violence and potential protective factors. He also collaborates with several Wood and Lucas County, OH community schools and agencies evaluating their school-based prevention programs aimed at enhancing self-esteem and decision-making skills and reducing problem behaviors. He is the editor of the journal Developmental Psychology and the President-Elect of the International Society for Research on Aggression.
Madeleine George, PhD
Madeleine George, PhD Post-Doctoral Research Associate Psychological Sciences, Purdue University
Madeleine George, PhD
Madeleine George, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral research associate working on the BlackBerry project with Dr. Marion Underwood at Purdue University. After completing her B.S. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madeleine taught fourth grade at Cofradia Bilingual School in Honduras and high school English at Lycee Bourdelle in France. She then began working with Dr. Candice Odgers at the University of California at Irvine and received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Duke University. Broadly, Madeleine’s research focuses on whether the quantity and quality of adolescents’ technology usage may influence their wellbeing and development. Currently, she is exploring how virtual communication may shape relationships with and support from parents, teachers, and peers by examining the content of adolescents’ text messages and social media use.
Arnold Glass, PhD
Arnold Glass, PhD, Stanford University
Arnold Glass, PhD
Arnold Glass received his BA in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is currently Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. He does basic research on human learning and memory and has written the textbook, Cognition: A Neuroscience Approach. He does applied research on instructional methodologies and on the effect of new technologies on cognition and social behavior. He has held grants for his research from both the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. He spent one year at the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge University. He has been awarded a James McKeen Cattell Fund Award for research while a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and a Fulbright Scholarship for research and teaching at the University of Oslo in Norway.
Anya Kamenetz
Anya Kamenetz, Education Correspondent for National Public Radio
Anya Kamenetz
Anya Kamenetz is an education correspondent for NPR (NPR.org/ed). She is the author of several books about learning and the future. Her latest (PublicAffairs, 2018) is The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media And Real Life.
Richard Halverson, PhD
Richard Halverson, PhD, Associate Dean for Innovation, Outreach and Partnerships, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education
Richard Halverson, PhD
Richard Halverson is is the Associate Dean for Innovation, Outreach and Partnerships and Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis in the UW-Madison School of Education. His research aims to bring the research methods and practices of the Learning Sciences to the world of educational leadership and interactive media. Rich is the founder of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning project, and was a co-founder and co-director the Games + Learning + Society Research Center. He is a former high school teacher and administrator, and earned an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. He is co-author (with Allan Collins) of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America and (with Carolyn Kelley) of Mapping Leadership: The Tasks that Matter for Improving Teaching and Learning in Schools.
Carolyn Heinrich, PhD
Carolyn Heinrich, PhD, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy, Education, and Economics, Peabody College of Education and Human Development and College of Arts and Sciences, Vanderbilt University
Carolyn Heinrich, PhD
Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics at Vanderbilt University. Heinrich’s research focuses on education, workforce development, social welfare policy, program evaluation, and public management and performance management. She works directly with federal, state and local governments in her research to improve policy design and program effectiveness and is currently studying the implementation and impacts of digital educational tools in K-12 public schools, with the aim to understand how educational technologies affect student learning and achievement gaps. She received the David N. Kershaw Award for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy analysis and management in 2004 and was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 2011.
Paul Hambleton
Paul Hambleton, MA, Special Education (Emotional and Behavior Disorders) and Language Arts Educator, Former Chief Academic Officer, Maine Department of Education
Paul Hambleton, MA
Paul is a Special Education (EBD) and Language Arts teacher with over 30 years’ experience in clasteaching, advocacy, and education policy. He earned National Board Certification in English Language Arts in 2000. Most recently, Paul served as the Chief Academic Officer for the Maine Department of Education, where he lead the Office of Learning Systems that incorporated federal programs, assessment, standards and instruction, and career and technical education. Paul has been involved with distance education, integration of digital technologies, and high quality professional practice throughout his career.
Serge Egelman, PhD
Serge Egelman, PhD, Director of Usable Security and Privacy Research, International Computer Science Institute; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Director of the Berkeley Laboratory for Usable and Experimental Studies (BLUES), University of California Berkeley
Serge Egelman, PhD
Serge Egelman is Research Director of the Usable Security & Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and also holds an appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley. He leads the Berkeley Laboratory for Usable and Experimental Security (BLUES), which is the amalgamation of his ICSI and UCB research groups. Serge's research focuses on the intersection of privacy, computer security, and human-computer interaction, with the specific aim of better understanding how people make decisions surrounding their privacy and security, and then creating data-driven improvements to systems and interfaces. This has included human subjects research on social networking privacy, access controls, authentication mechanisms, web browser security warnings, and privacy-enhancing technologies. His work has received multiple best paper awards, including seven ACM CHI Honorable Mentions, the 2012 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) Distinguished Paper Award for his work on smartphone application permissions, the 2017 SOUPS Impact Award, and the 2012 Information Systems Research Best Published Paper Award for his work on consumers' willingness to pay for online privacy. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and prior to that was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. He has also performed research at NIST, Brown University, Microsoft Research, and Xerox PARC.
Zsolt Demetrovics, PhD
Zsolt Demetrovics, PhD, DSc, Dean of the Faculty of Education and Psychology, Head of the Department of Clinical Psychology & Addiction, Professor of Psychology, Director of the Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary; Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Behavioral Addictions
Zsolt Demetrovics, PhD
Zsolt Demetrovics, PhD, DSc, is professor of psychology at the ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary where he serves as dean of the Faculty of Education and Psychology, director of the Institute of Psychology and head of the Department of Clinical Psychology & Addiction. He is clinical psychologist (specialized in addiction), cultural anthropologist, and has a Ph.D. in clinical and health psychology (addictive behaviors). He has published numerous research papers on the epidemiology, assessment and psychological correlates of substance use behavior and behavioral addictions including gambling, video gaming, internet addiction, exercise addiction, and compulsive buying. He is former president of the Hungarian Association on Addictions, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, and president of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Addictions.
Joanne Broder Sumerson, PhD
Joanne Broder Sumerson, PhD, Temple University
Joanne Broder Sumerson, PhD
Dr. Joanne Broder Sumerson is a research psychologist dedicated to closing the gap between research and practice. In 2017, she was President of the Society for Media Psychology and Technology of the American Psychological Association and launched the Device Management and Intelligence Committee. For over 20 years, she has been consulting to public and private organizations by creating assessment tools to help them get the answers they need. Her first book, Finish Your Dissertation, Don’t Let It Finish You! is the text she uses for her teaching and coaching. She is the co-founding Associate Editor of Psychology of Popular Media Culture, published by the APA, and blogs for Psychology Today Magazine. She is also an Affiliate Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia where she teaches ground-based and online courses as well as advises students through their thesis research studies and capstone projects. Joanne earned a Ph.D. in 2004 in Education Psychology and M.Ed. in Adult and Organization Development in 2000 from Temple University, as well as a B.A. in Psychology in 1993 from Monmouth University. Joanne’s past work experience includes a prison counselor, corporate human resources generalist, and research and evaluation specialist.
Brenda Wiederhold, PhD
Brenda Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCB, BCN, Virtual Reality Medical Center; Interactive Media Institute; Editor-in-Chief of CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking
Brenda Wiederhold, PhD
Professor Dr. Brenda K. Wiederhold, Ph.D., MBA, BCB, BCN is President of the Virtual Reality Medical Center (VRMC), with offices in Sorrento Valley, La Jolla and Coronado, California; Qingdao, China; and Brussels, Belgium. Professor Wiederhold is registered as a Licensed Clinical Psychologist with the California Board of Psychology and the Belgian Commission des Psychologues. Her doctorate is in Clinical Health Psychology, and she is Board Certified in both Biofeedback and Neurofeedback. She is Chief Executive Officer of the Interactive Media Institute, a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the application of advanced technologies for patient care; a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD; Medical Staff at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla and Co-chair Pain and Palliative Care Committee; a Visiting Professor at the Catholic University in Milan and an Advisory Board Member for the International Child Art Foundation in Washington, DC.
Stephen Uzzo, PhD
Stephen Uzzo, PhD, Chief Scientist, New York Hall of Science; Adjunct Professor, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT)
Stephen Uzzo, PhD
As chief scientist for the New York Hall of Science and adjunct professor at NYIT, Stephen Uzzo develops and leads large-scale initiatives to integrate cutting-edge science and technology into teaching and learning, and teaches courses in STEM learning at NYIT. He currently leads initiatives to build communities of practice and improve literacy of the public in complexity and data driven science and engineering. His dissemination activities include organizing international conferences and symposia and speaking at six to 10 major conferences per year. His background includes over 20 years of professional experience in teaching, learning, and research in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and prior to that, 10 years in video and computer graphics systems engineering. Uzzo’s research interests include complex networks, teaching and learning of data-driven STEM, and the impact of big data on teaching and learning; his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and a variety of private foundations and corporations. He holds a terminal degree in network theory and environmental studies from the Union Institute and serves on a number of advisory boards for institutions related to his interests. Having never lived very far from the ocean in New York and California, Uzzo has also been a lifelong advocate for marine conservation.
