Appendix A
Committee Member Biosketches
Sandro Galea, Dr.PH., M.D., M.P.H. (Chair), a physician, epidemiologist, and author, is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. One of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences, Dr. Galea has published more than 1,000 scientific journal articles, 75 chapters, and 20 books. He has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature about the social causes of health, mental health, and trauma. He has documented the consequences of mass trauma and conflict worldwide, including as a result of the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His research has been principally funded by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and philanthropic foundations.
Dr. Galea serves frequently on advisory groups to national and global organizations. He currently serves as the chair of the board of the Boston Board of Health, and of John Snow Inc., a global public health consultancy, as well as chair of the Boston Public Health Commission Board of Health. He formerly served as chair of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Community Services Board and as a member of its Health Board. He is past chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Galea has received several lifetime achievement awards for his research, including the Rema Lapouse Award from the American
Public Health Association and the Robert S. Laufer, Ph.D., Memorial Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is a regular contributor to a range of public media.
Galea was born in Malta and emigrated to Canada with his family at the age of 14. After receiving his medical degree, Galea worked in Somalia with Doctors Without Borders before attending graduate school in the United States. Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto, graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow. Prior to his appointment at Boston University, Galea served as the Gelman Professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at the University of Michigan and at the New York Academy of Medicine.
Ceren Budak, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the School of Information, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a faculty associate at the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests lie in the area of computational social science. She uses network science, machine learning, and crowdsourcing methods and draws from scientific knowledge across multiple social science communities to contribute computational methods to the field of political communication.
Her work appears in conferences and journals that span disciplines such as computer science, communication, and political science; she recently coauthored Words that Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020). She served as an editor-in-chief and a program chair for the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation (through NSF: CAREER, NSF: CISE, and NSF: GCR awards), the Social Science Research Council, and the Michigan Institute for Data Science.
Munmun De Choudhury, Ph.D., is an associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. De Choudhury is best known for laying the foundation of a new line of research that develops computational techniques toward understanding and improving mental health outcomes, through ethical analysis of social media data. To do this work, she adopts a highly interdisciplinary approach, combining social computing, machine learning, and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Dr. De Choudhury has been recognized with the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award, the 2022 Web Science Trust Test-of-Time Award, the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award,
the 2019 Complex Systems Society—Junior Scientific Award, numerous best paper and honorable mention awards from the ACM and AAAI, and features and coverage in popular press like the New York Times, the NPR, and the BBC. Earlier, Dr. De Choudhury was a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, a postdoc at Microsoft Research, and obtained her PhD in computer science from Arizona State University. She founded and directs the Social Dynamics and Well-Being Lab at Georgia Tech, which previously received funding from Instagram and Yahoo. In the past, she has attended meetings at Google, Meta, and Twitter for which the companies paid travel expenses. More than 5 years ago her lab had funding from Instagram and Yahoo. A grant from Microsoft currently funds a research project at her lab using artificial intelligence to match volunteers and callers to a crisis phone line.
Douglas Gentile, Ph.D., M.A., is an award-winning research scientist, educator, author, and a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University. His experience includes more than 30 years conducting research with children and adults. He is the editor of the book Media Violence and Children (two editions), and co-author of the books Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy, Game On! Sensible Answers about Video Games and Media Violence, Learning from Video Games (and Everything Else), and Finding the Freedom to Get Unstuck and Be Happier. He has authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, including studies on the positive and negative effects of mass media on children in several countries, video game addiction, and mindfulness practices for reducing anxiety and increasing happiness.
He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He was honored with the Distinguished Lifetime Contributions Award to Media Psychology and Technology by the American Psychological Association, and he was named one of the Top 300 Professors in the United States by the Princeton Review. Dr. Gentile runs the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University where he conducts research on media’s impact on children and adults. As the leader of this effort, Dr. Gentile develops and conducts research projects designed to give parents and other caregivers the kind of information they need and want to make informed media choices for their children. His research has been supported by several grants, including grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Gentile speaks internationally to community, education, health care, and parent groups. Praised as an engaging and energetic speaker,
he speaks about issues such as the connection between media and brain development, the effects of television and video game violence, the effects of tobacco and alcohol advertising on adolescents, and the psychology of advertising. Dr. Gentile has consulted in the past with DQ Institute and Partnership for a Healthy Iowa; he serves on the advisory board for the Partnership for a Healthy Iowa. He has formerly served on advisory committees for the World Health Organization, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Screen Time Network, and Fair Play for Kids’ Screen Time Action Network.
Amanda Guyer, Ph.D., M.Phil., M.S., is a developmental psychologist and professor in the Human Development and Family Studies unit of the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California, Davis. She is also the associate director of the Center for Mind and Brain and is affiliated with the Center for Poverty and Inequality Research. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and an associate editor for Developmental Psychology and Emotion. Dr. Guyer has expertise in the biological, cognitive and social-emotional aspects of human development during adolescence—notably, the behavioral and neural mechanisms that may underlie the way that adolescents think and feel. She investigates neural and behavioral underpinnings of adolescent mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use) via social, emotional, and cognitive processes. She has identified behavioral responses and neural activity and brain networks involved when children and adolescents attend to, evaluate, and remember facial emotions, social threats, peer evaluation, and rewards. She considers age, temperament, and sex differences in these processes, and variability related to adverse and stressful life events, and peer and family factors. She has articulated new conceptual models of neurobiological sensitivity to social context and environmental stressors to enhance understanding of child and adolescent mental health. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and William T. Grant Foundation Scholars Program.
Jeff Hancock, Ph.D., M.Sc., is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. A leading expert in social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction, Dr. Hancock studies the impact of social media and AI technology on social cognition, well-being, deception and trust, and how we use and understand language. His award-winning research has been published in over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings and has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. Dr. Hancock’s TED Talk
on deception has been seen over 1 million times and his research has been frequently featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS, and the BBC.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D., conducts research focused on understanding the long-term health effects, biological mechanisms, and effective strategies to mitigate risk and promote protection associated with social connection. Her work has been seminal in the recognition of social isolation and loneliness as risk factors for early mortality. She serves as a scientific advisor and regularly consults for organizations across sectors aimed at addressing this issue. She has provided expert testimony in a U.S. congressional hearing, served as a member of a National Academy of Sciences consensus committee, scientific advisory for the U.S. Surgeon General, the UK Cross Departmental Loneliness Team, European Joint Research Council, World Health Organization, and a subject matter expert for the Gravity Project and Commit to Connect, the national clearinghouse of interventions. She served as the lead scientific editor on the Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. She has also provided uncompensated input on the Gallup/Meta survey of social connectedness. Her work has been widely recognized within her discipline, including several awards, and is regularly highlighted in major media outlets.
Stephanie Reich, Ph.D., is professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in informatics and psychological science. She is director of the Development in Social Context lab and member of the Connected Learning Lab. Dr. Reich’s research focuses on understanding and improving the social context of children’s lives. As such, her empirical investigations center on direct, indirect, and reciprocal influences on children, specifically through the family, digital, and school environments. Her work spans from infancy through college, with particular focus on individual, familial, and community assets. As such, her research is often in partnership with schools, medical settings, and nonprofit organizations. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and Society for Community Research and Action. She is recipient of the Distinguished Early Career Applied Contributions to Media Psychology and the Technology Award from the American Psychological Association. She serves on the advisory boards of Raising Good Gamers, Future of Childhood, and Next Gen Public Media (By/With/For Tweens and Teens). Having earned her Ph.D. in psychology and human development with a focus on community psychology and program evaluation, her work is largely applied and in collaboration with other disciplines and community members.
Miguel Sarzosa, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of economics at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Sarzosa’s research fields are applied microeconomics and labor economics. He focuses on understanding the impact various contexts have on the accumulation of skills in infants, children, and adolescents, and how these skills can affect their outcomes later in life. Dr. Sarzosa examines factors such as prenatal health, grade retention, in-classroom social interactions, teacher quality, gender norms, and discrimination. He investigates how children learn, how resource scarcity and peer interactions can affect learning, and how learning differentials affect success in adulthood. His work emphasizes socio-emotional skills (also known as noncognitive, or soft, skills) as essential components of the learning process and critical drivers of social interactions and adult outcomes.
Leslie Walker-Harding, M.D., is the Ford/Morgan Endowed Professor and chair of the Department of Pediatrics as well as associate dean for the University of Washington. She is also the chief academic officer and senior vice president for Seattle Children’s Hospital. She has been dedicated to the health and well-being of children and adolescents for more than 25 years, particularly in the area of prevention of adolescent substance use and promotion of healthy adolescent development. Her current focus is to raise awareness of, and bring to national scale, proven interventions to prevent the development of substance use and mental health conditions in children and adolescents. In this effort she is cochair of the Forum for Children’s Well-Being: Promoting Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Health for Children and Youth in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Christopher Yoo, J.D., M.B.A., is the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition, an independent research center that receives unrestricted funding from a variety of organizations, including internet- and broadband-based companies. Mr. Yoo has emerged as one of the world’s leading authorities on law and technology. One of the most cited scholars in administrative and regulatory law as well as intellectual property, he has authored or edited five books and more than 100 scholarly works. In the past, he had research support from Google.
His major research projects include investigating innovative ways to connect more people to the internet; comparing and examining proposals to apply antitrust law in China, Europe, and the United States; law to big tech firms; analyzing the technical determinants of optimal interoper-
ability; promoting privacy and security for autonomous vehicles; medical devices; cyber-physical systems and the internet’s routing architecture; and studying the regulation of internet platforms. He has also created innovative joint degree programs designed to produce a new generation of professionals with advanced training in both law and engineering. He is frequently called to testify before the U.S. Congress, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, foreign governments, and international organizations. He recently served as an expert witness in litigation involving internet service providers. He has served as a member of the Federal Communication Commission’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, the Board of Advisors for the American Law Institute’s Project on Principles of Law for Data Privacy and the Restatement of Principles for a Data Economy, and as co-convener of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum’s Initiative on Connecting and Enabling the Next Billions. Before entering academia, he served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge A. Raymond Randolph of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
