Contributors

Earl Aguilera. Earl Aguilera is an associate professor in the Teacher Education Department at California State University, East Bay. When he is not working directly with K-12 teachers and students, he researches and writes about issues at the intersection of digital media literacies, educational technology, and critical pedagogy. Prior to earning his Ph.D., he worked as a high school English/Language Arts teacher, K-12 Reading Specialist, and college reading instructor.

Armaan Bhasin. Armaan Bhasin is a youth author on “Social Media Use Measures: Critical Considerations for Supporting Adolescent Mental Wellbeing.” He has participated in the Summer Research Scholars program, in which he led a research project on social media and adolescent health, as well as the SMAHRT Youth Advisory Board. He is a junior at the Brookfield Academy.

Garv Bhasin. Garv Bhasin is a youth author on “Social Media Use Measures: Critical Considerations for Supporting Adolescent Mental Wellbeing.” He has participated in the Summer Research Scholars program, in which he led a research project on social media and adolescent health, as well as the SMAHRT Youth Advisory Board. He is a senior at the Brookfield Academy.

Linda Charmaraman. Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D. is a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, and founder/director of the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab (www.youthmediawellbeing.org). She also teaches Social Technologies and Adolescent Development in the Education department. Her research interests include adolescent social media risk and resilience, innovative research methods to include overlooked and hidden populations and contexts, and how social identities (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation) affect online and offline wellbeing. Her recent collaborative work with Catherine Delcourt bridges research and action programming through a summer digital wellbeing workshop and a Youth Advisory Board that engages youth in (re)defining healthy digital media use. Her research program has been funded by NICHD, Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Morningstar Family Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Schott Foundation for Public Education, I Am Strong Foundation. Email contact: [email protected]

Sophia Choukas-Bradley. Dr. Sophia Choukas-Bradley is a licensed clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Brown University in 2008 and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Clinical Psychology in 2016. She completed her pre-doctoral internship and post-doctoral fellowship at Western Psychiatric Hospital in Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on sociocultural influences on adolescent mental health, with an emphasis on social media use, body image and disordered eating, gender and sexuality, and LGBTQ+ youth, and an increasing focus on adolescents’ intersecting marginalized identities. In addition to directing the Teen and Young Adult Lab, she writes a blog for Psychology Today, provides clinical supervision to doctoral students, and teaches courses on adolescence, psychopathology, and social development.

Monica Clark. Monica Clark, PhD (she/they) is Teach YR Director at YR Media a Peabody Award-winning youth-driven production company. She researches and writes about equity, justice and civic engagement and imagination in education. Clark has extensive experience conducting community-engaged action research that brings youth in as authentic co-investigators to explore the issues that matter to them at school. Monica has taught university courses focused on critical media studies, youth subcultures, and education reform and equity. Currently, in her role at YR Media, Clark is working on a number of related projects, including one that involves students and educators co-designing curriculum to foster a sense of student belonging in a variety of educational spaces and another exploring the impact of young people reporting and creating dynamic engagements focused on youth mental health and wellbeing. The second project included the recent publication of a whitepaper entitled “Narrative Change and Impact: Youth Mental Health and Well-being Content and Conversations.” The report shares best practices for collaborating with emerging content creators to tell their own mental health and wellbeing stories and highlights the need for youth envisioned, led and designed safe spaces online.

Anne Collier. As founder and executive director of the nonprofit Net Safety Collaborative, Anne Collier has been writing about youth and digital media at NetFamilyNews.org and many publications over more than 20 years and serves on the Trust & Safety advisories of Meta, Twitter, YouTube and Yubo and also advises UK-based children’s metaverse startup Kabuni. In 2005, she co-founded ConnectSafely.org, serving as its co-director for a decade. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education in the US and the international advisories of the Young & Resilient Research Center at Western Sydney University and Project Rockit in Melbourne. She is active in the user care space, having piloted a social media helpline for US schools, 2016-‘18. A native of Boston, she currently resides in Tallinn, Estonia. Contact: [email protected]

Katie Davis. Dr. Katie Davis is Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) Information School, Adjunct Associate Professor in the UW College of Education, and a founding member and Co-Director of the UW Digital Youth Lab. Davis investigates the impact of digital technologies on young people’s learning, development, and wellbeing, and co-designs positive technology experiences for youth and their families. Her work bridges the fields of human development, human-computer interaction, and the learning sciences. In addition to her academic papers, Davis is the author of three books exploring technology’s role in young people’s lives, including Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up (MIT Press, 2023). She holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate in Human Development and Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Sidrah Durrani. Sidrah Durrani, B.A. is a masters student at Teachers College, Columbia University. She collaborates with the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley College where she works on multiple projects, including the Wellesley Summer Digital Wellbeing Workshop. Sidrah received her bachelors in Psychology from Stony Brook University and served as a Project Assistant at Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development prior to graduate school. Sidrah’s research interests include adolescent social media use and how it impacts their development and wellbeing.

Thomas Grace. Thomas Grace is an information systems researcher who is currently completing his PhD in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on exploring how the design of virtual worlds and online spaces affects cooperation and interaction in online communities. Before coming to UCI, Thomas was a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa for five years, where he taught courses on programming, software engineering, and system design. In addition to his work on online communities, Thomas has also conducted research on the effectiveness of digital games as a learning tool in programming education and other game-related topics. He has published several papers in conferences linked to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association of Information Systems (AIS) as well as journal articles related to learning and technology.

Catherine Grevet Delcourt. Catherine Grevet Delcourt, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, affiliated with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the Media Arts and Science program, and has both pedagogical and industrial experience leading User-Centered Design processes. She teaches courses on the Socio-Techno Web, Human-Computer Interaction, and Social Computing. Her research interests center around prototyping and design processes for novel prosocial social systems. Her research projects have focused on digital wellbeing and positive online spaces for middle school girls, social media and political polarization, identity and anonymity in online conversations, novel prototyping methods for social systems research, personal information management, and personal informatics. She previously worked as a UX Researcher at Yik Yak, a college-based hyperlocal anonymous social networking app and co-authored a patent, owned by Apple, on interactive application sharing. Email contact: [email protected]

J. Maya Hernandez. J. Maya Hernandez, Ph.D. is a youth development and digital age scholar and the head of next generation initiatives at the Go For Broke Education Center in Los Angeles. Her scholarship focuses on the risks and opportunities of social technologies for adolescent wellbeing with an emphasis on historically marginalized communities. While her background in developmental psychology influences her work, she works across the disciplines of psychology, public health, and informatics with a social ecological lens (e.g., intersections of individual, family, community, and industry characteristics). Her multi-method approaches to this field of work have been published in peer-review journals and presented at multidisciplinary conferences such as CHI, Society for Research on Child Development, APA Technology, Mind, and Society, American Educational Research Association, and the International Communication Association. Email contact: [email protected]

Mizuko Ito. Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist, learning scientist, entrepreneur, and an advocate for connected learning—learning that is equity-oriented, centered on youth interest, and socially connected. Her work decodes digital youth culture for parents and educators, offering ways to tap interests and digital media to fuel learning that is engaging, relevant, and social. She is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Connected Learning Lab. The CLL stewards the Connected Learning Alliance, an expanding network of educators, experts and youth-serving organizations mobilizing new technology in the service of equity, access and opportunity for all young people. Mimi is also co-founder of Connected Camps, a non-profit providing online learning experiences for kids in all walks of life. Her publications include: Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children (2023), Social Media and Youth Wellbeing (2020), The Connected Learning Research Network: Reflections on a Decade of Engaged Scholarship (2020), Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning (2018), and From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies (2017).

Krithika Jagannath. Krithika Jagannath is a researcher in HCI with a background in Computer Science, Developmental Science and the Learning Sciences. She is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley and A CERES Scholar. Her work is situated in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and draws from developmental science of adolescents, design-based research, and mixed methods for understanding how online play-based contexts can promote healthy social development for Very Young Adolescents (VYAs, typically 7-14 years).

Carrie James. Carrie James is a sociologist, researcher, the current Co-Director of Project Zero, and a Co-Founder of The Center for Digital Thriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on young people’s digital experiences, including opportunities and challenges for their wellbeing, social connections, and civic lives. With Emily Weinstein, Carrie is co-author of the book, Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults are Missing), which details insights from research with thousands of teens. Carrie has a Ph.D. in Sociology from NYU and is a parent to two technology-loving children, ages 14 and 18.

Vikki Katz. Vikki Katz (Ph.D., USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism) is a Professor in the School of Communication at Chapman University. Until 2022, she was an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research program examines how children, parents, and young adults from lower-income, working-class, and immigrant families respond to challenges related to digital inequality. More details about her research can be found at vikkikatz.com.

Bradley Kerr. Bradley Kerr is a researcher on the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team (SMAHRT) within the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has completed a master’s of Administrative Leadership with a focus in Higher Education Administration and has contributed to research in social media and adolescent health for over ten years. Recent work by Mr. Kerr has included a systematic review examining measures of social media use in studies of social media and adolescent anxiety.

Luna Laliberte. Luna Laliberte (MA, Rutgers) earned her BA and MA degrees from the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She now works at The Chronicle of Higher Education. While at Rutgers, she worked with Dr. Katz on understanding students’ transitions and adjustments to remote learning. She aspires to continue conducting research that encourages interdisciplinary approaches to the experiences that young and diverse people have with technology. More information about her projects can be found at lunalaliberte.com.

Ian Larson. Ian Larson is a PhD candidate in the University of California, Irvine’s Informatics Department. His work is situated at the intersection of sociology and games research and focuses on alternative histories of video game adoption and prosocial design for more inclusive multiplayer communities.

Natasha Matta. Natasha Matta is a youth author on “Social Media Use Measures: Critical Considerations for Supporting Adolescent Mental Wellbeing.” She has participated in the Summer Research Scholars program, in which she led a research project on social media and adolescent health, as well as the Technology and Adolescent Mental Wellness Youth Advisory Board. She is a freshman at the University of Michigan.

Cherise McBride. Cherise McBride, PhD (she/her) is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in a dual appointment with the Graduate School of Education and Stanford Impact Labs–an incubator for community-engaged research. She studies digital literacies, youth media, and teacher learning, seeking to understand & articulate how we design equitable learning environments. Dr. McBride’s research has been featured in numerous national and international publications including with the International Society of the Learning Sciences, the American Educational Research Association, and Pedagogies: An International Journal. Dr. McBride earned her Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley’s School of Education in Language, Literacy and Culture.

Members of the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab Youth Advisory Board ’21-22. Members of the Youth Advisory Board ‘21-’22, aged 12-24, come from novice to expert user experiences with the most popular social media platforms in today’s digital ecosystem:

Alyssa Gramajo. Alyssa Gramajo, B.S. is a Research Associate at the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley Centers for Women. In this capacity, she serves as the Project Coordinator for the Digital Wellbeing Workshop and the Youth Advisory Board. Email contact: [email protected]

Quan Gu. Quan Gu studies Media Arts and Sciences at Wellesley College, and she’s a research intern at the YMW lab. She joined the Youth Advisory Board to help improve adolescents’ mental wellbeing through technology. In her free time, Connie loves playing sports and she's part of the Wellesley Ultimate Frisbee team, the Whiptails.

Joanna Joby. Joanna Joby is an 8th grader from Massachusetts. She was a participant of the Wellesley Summer Digital Wellbeing Workshop for two years. She loves to design colorful logos and prints and has helped design the Youth Advisory Board logo. Her interests include volunteering at local businesses (library, community clubs). She loves to stay active in her community by contributing to local events.

Le Fan (Teresa) Xiao. Le Fan (Teresa) Xiao, B. A., is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in Psychology. She is a research assistant at the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women, having been able to get involved in multiple projects including the Youth Advisory Board and Summer Digital Wellbeing Workshop. She is excited to be returning to Wellesley College in the fall as the new Psychology Department Research Coordinator. Email contact: [email protected]

Tijana Milosevic. Dr. Tijana Milosevic is an Elite-S Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (MSCA COFUND programme) at Dublin City University, Ireland; she is jointly appointed with the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre and ADAPT SFI, focusing on social media policies and digital media use among children and youth. She is the PI on a Facebook-funded project “Co-designing with Children: A Rights-based approach to fighting Cyberbullying” and her most recent work examines the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI)-based interventions on social media from children’s perspective. She is also a member of the EU Kids Online research network and she has coordinated data collection for the EU Kids Online project in Serbia (nationally-representative survey on children’s digital media use). Her monograph “Protecting Children Online? Cyberbullying Policies of Social Media Companies” was published in The MIT Press Information Society Series and she authored and co- authored a number of articles on children’s media use, among other topics. At ABC, Tijana also led the Irish data collection for “Kids Digital Lives in Covid-19 Times (KiDiCoTi),” an international project coordinated by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC). The project in Ireland included a survey on a national sample of children aged 10-18 about their digital media use and online risks during the Covid-19 lockdown. On behalf of ABC, she has testified about children’s digital media use and online safety in front of the Irish Parliamentary Committees (Oireachtas) three times since 2019, and has given numerous media interviews to the Irish and international media. Contact: [email protected]

Megan A. Moreno. Megan A. Moreno has been the principal investigator of the SMAHRT since 2009. She is the Interim Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Moreno completed her medical degree at the George Washington University School of Medicine and residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has also completed master’s degrees in Public Health and Education. Recent work by Dr. Moreno has included developing and testing measures of adolescent technology and social media use focused on technology interactions.

Ioanna Noula. Dr. Ioanna Noula is a researcher working at the intersection of citizenship education, children’s rights, public policy and organisational governance. She is co-founder and Senior Leader in Operations with the Internet Commission, a non-profit organisation that advances digital responsibility through independent evaluation. As a childhood and education scholar she has conducted post-doctoral research in the UCL-Institute of Education and LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. She has worked as a teacher in Greece and the UK and is Visiting Fellow in LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. [email protected]

Janice Peng. Janice Peng is a youth author on “Social Media Use Measures: Critical Considerations for Supporting Adolescent Mental Wellbeing.” They have participated in the Summer Research Scholars program, in which they led a research project on social media and adolescent health, as well as the SMAHRT Youth Advisory Board. They are a freshman at Pomona College.

Jenny Radesky, MD. Dr. Radesky is the David G. Dickinson Collegiate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is Director of the Division of Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics and focuses clinically on autism, neurodiversity, and advocacy. Her NIH-funded research examines the use of mobile and interactive technology by parents and young children, parent-child relationships, and child social- emotional development. She authored the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) policy statements Media and Young Minds and Digital Advertising to Children and is a co-Medical Director of the SAMHSA- funded AAP Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.

Stephanie M. Reich. Stephanie M. Reich is a Professor of Education and part of the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine. Trained as a community psychologist with a focus on child development and program evaluation, her research aims to better understand children’s social lives and how best to promote healthy development. The bulk of her work explores direct and indirect influences on children and youth, specifically through the family, peers, school, and media.

Katie Salen Tekinbaş. Katie Salen is Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, a member of the Connected Learning Lab, as well as Chief Designer and co-founder of Connected Camps, an online learning platform powered by youth gaming experts. She is founding Executive Director of Institute of Play and led the design of Quest to Learn, an innovative New York City public school. Katie is co-author of Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader, Quest to Learn: Growing a School for Digital Kids, and Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning. She was an early advocate of the then-hidden world of machinima and her current research focuses on the design of caring and care(full) online communities, systems for peer mentorship, and conflict resolution in multiplayer games.

Elisabeth Soep. Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep, PhD, Senior Scholar-in-Residence and Special Projects Producer, YR Media. [email protected]. Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep, PhD (she/her) is Senior Scholar-in-Residence and Special Projects Producer at YR Media, a Peabody Award-winning youth-driven production company where she served as Executive Producer for journalism until 2020. She has produced and edited hundreds of audio, online, and interactive features with youth for outlets including NPR and the New York Times; established the organization’s tech and mental health desks and research division; and — with YR Media alum Asha Richardson — founded the country’s first youth coding program embedded in a national newsroom. Lissa’s books include Code for What? (forthcoming MIT Press with Clifford Lee), Participatory Politics (MIT Press), Drop that Knowledge (UC Press with Vivian Chávez), and Youthscapes (UPenn Press with Sunaina Maira). She has a PhD in education from Stanford. For six years, Lissa was a part of the Youth and Participatory Politics research network — a group of scholars brought together by the MacArthur Foundation to shift the paradigm on how we understand and promote youth civic life in digital times. She’s an advisor to the Civic Imagination Project at the University of Southern California and the Data Literacy with, for, and by Youth project at Pratt Institute. She is Senior Editor at Vox Media Podcast Network where she works on narrative shows, runs a learning series, and is part of the Language, Please project backed by Google News Initiative to catalyze inclusive local newsrooms nationwide.

Elisabeth Staksrud. Dr. Elisabeth Staksrud (PhD, MAE) is Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, researching online censorship, and children’s rights and risks, censorship and research ethics. Her work challenges common assumptions about how to research and understand what is in children’s best interest and the relationship between rights to participation and protection in public discourse, policy and practice. Staksrud’s research areas include research on children and media related risk (e.g., digital bullying, grooming, sexual harassment, and privacy violations. She has written several books and articles on children’s use of digital tools and the differences between families, cultures and countries. Her book “Children in the Online world: Risk, Regulation, Rights” (Routledge, 2016) deals with the balancing of media risk, problematic regulatory practices, and the pressure this puts on children’s participatory and provisional rights. She has advised national governments and international organizations on children’s risk and rights in the online environment. Staksrud has been PI and work package leader for numerous international research projects. She is the coordinator of the 35-country EU Kids Online network, and in 2018 she was lead their 19-country international EU Kids Online Study. She has chaired the Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH) and initiated and led the establishment of ethical guidelines for research on the Internet in Norway as well as revision of the national ethical guidelines. Between 2017-2021 she chaired the European Communication Research and Education Association’s Children, Youth and Media Section. Before returning to academia, she worked for seven years at the Norwegian Board of Film Classification as a senior policy advisor and film censor. Contact: [email protected]

Allison Starks. Allison Starks is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines the affordances and limitations of technology for positive child outcomes across contexts, with a special emphasis on school-level technology practices and children’s rights online.

Zoe Stratman. Zoe Stratman is a previous research specialist on the SMAHRT with over two years of experience researching social media and adolescent health. She completed a bachelor’s of science degree in biology in 2021. She attends medical school at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Zhaoyuan Su. Zhaoyuan Su is a PhD student in the Informatics department at the University of California Irvine. Situated in healthcare contexts, his research examines the design and use of data-driven and algorithmic systems, and their impact on children and caregivers in family life and workplaces.

Tiera Tanksley. Dr. Tanksley’s scholarship, which theorizes a critical race technology theory (CRTT) in education, extends conventional education research to include sociotechnical and techno-structural analyses of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies. Specifically, Dr. Tanksley’s research examines anti-Blackness as “the default setting” of AI and examines the socioemotional, mental health and consequences of algorithmic racism in the lives and schooling experiences of Black youth. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist and rewrite racially biased technologies to produce more just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora.

Dr. Tanksley has been awarded several competitive grants in computer science, robotics and engineering. Most recently, she was awarded an Engineering and AI-Augmented Learning grant for her research on Abolitionist Approaches to AI, in which she collaborates with Black youth to design race-conscious and justice-oriented technologies. In 2022, Dr. Tanksley received the Emerging Leader in Critical Race Technology Studies Fellowship from UCLA, and in 2023 she was awarded the Op Ed Public Voices in Technology fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.

Jules Weed. Jules Weed, B.A. is a recent graduate of Wellesley College and a former intern in the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Lab. Jules worked closely with staff in the lab to design and implement the Youth Advisory Board and held the title of “Youth Chair” during its first year. Their academic and professional interests revolve around youth agency and education and they are currently completing a year of service through Americorps as a counselor for high school students in Denver, Colorado.

Emily Weinstein. Dr. Emily Weinstein is a psychologist, researcher, author, and lecturer who has spent over a decade working on questions like: How do youth experience adolescence in an age of social media? What can adults do to help, and particularly to build digital agency? Weinstein is co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is also a Principal Investigator at Project Zero. With Carrie James, she wrote the book Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (And Adults Are Missing).