Our mission is to study children, teens, and emerging adults’ interaction with the newer forms of interactive digital media and to see how these interactions both affect and reflect their offline lives and long-term development. We endeavor to keep up with the latest technologies used by young people.
Ph.D.
Dr. Brendesha Tynes received her PhD in Educational Psychology from UCLA. She served as Lab Manager of CDMC at its inception and, as a graduate student, authored a number of publications relating to communications media and race. She is currently Dean’s Professor of Educational Equity and a professor of Education and Psychology at the USC Rossier School of Education. Her research focuses on youth experiences with digital media, and how they are associated with academic and socio-emotional outcomes.
She is also interested in equity in digital literacy, which includes empowering uses of digital tools for underrepresented youth. She is currently principal investigator on three primary projects: The Teen Life Online and in Schools Project (TLOS), the E-Cope Project, and the Digital Equity Project.
Email: btynes@usc.edu
Ph.D. Human Development and Psychology, UCLA
Minas continues to publish widely in the area of technology and identity. He was a Dean’s Scholar and a Marion W. Wells Fellow at UCLA. As Lecturer at Cal State LA, Minas teaches courses on multicultural issues relating to ethnicity/race, gender, and sexuality, and works closely with immigrant-origin undergraduate and graduate students.
Minas is a proud first-generation Armenian immigrant. Minas is a proud first-generation Armenian immigrant.
Ph.D.
Adriana Manago received her Ph.D. degree in developmental psychology and a certificate in Culture, Brain, and Development from UCLA in 2011. Dr. Manago is currently an assistant professor of developmental psychology at UC Santa Cruz and Senior Researcher at Children’s Digital Media Center @ Los Angeles. She studies development in a variety of cultural contexts, including the online cultural context of social networking sites.
She has examined how adolescents engage in romantic partnering and gendered self-presentations online and how the nature of peer interactions on social networking sites impact adolescents’ self constructions. She is the recipient of the Millard Madsen Distinguished Dissertatin Award in Developmental Psychology. She earned her B.A. in journalism at West Virginia University and her M.A. in experimental psychology at San Jose State University.
Contact: Faculty Page
Email: amanago@ucsc.edu
Ph.D.
Dr. Nevfel Boz, recieved his Ph.D in Communication Studies from Marmara University in Turkey. He spent two years at Childrens Digital Media Center as a post-doctoral researcher. His research centers on digital identity and self presentation in new media. He has carried out a cross cultural comparison study in Turkey and the United States. To learn more about the research visit “Cross-Cultural Comparison of Adolescents’ Online Self-Presentation Strategies: Turkey and the United States.”
Studying how social network site (SNS) users from different countries present themselves is crucial for inquiring into the dynamics of culture and youth. This study of 100 adolescents age 14-18 (Mage= 15.90, SD = .1.48) was designed to determine whether cultural differences between adolescents in the U.S. and Turkey would manifest themselves in their online self-presentation strategies on Facebook. Snowball sampling was used to reach U.S. and Turkish adolescents (50 participants from each country) who were using Facebook.
Contact: Faculty Page
Contact: LinkedIn
Ph.D.
Dr. Guan immigrated with her family to Los Angeles at the age of two. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UCLA.
She studies the psychology and physiology of social bonding across cultural & media contexts, particularly among ethnic minority and immigrant adolescents and young adults.
She is interested in the ways social contexts (e.g., relationships, culture, and technology/digital media) affect mental and physical well-being, particularly among ethnic minority and immigrant adolescents and young adults.
Contact: Faculty Page
Email: angie.guan@csun.edu
Ph.D. Student
Eline Frison is a PhD student at the Leuven School for Mass Communication Research. Her research, supervised by professor Steven Eggermont, explores social media effects in adolescence. More specifically, her PhD project investigates the relationships between social networking site use (in particular Facebook), (online) stress, (online) social support, and adolescents’ well-being.
The objectives of her PhD project are, first, to further examine the relationship between SNS use and adolescents’ well-being; second, to explore the role of adolescents’ level of (online) stress within this relationship; third, to investigate whether online social support, like traditional social support, protects adolescents’ from the negative impact of stress on their well-being. These questions will be answered by a three-wave longitudinal panel study among 12 –to 17-year olds.
Contact: Faculty Page
Contact: LinkedIn
Ph.D.
Lauren Sherman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Temple University. She is interested in the ways adolescents and emerging adults use digital technology to interact with peers and the way these interactions influence social development. She is also interested in broader cultural and social change as influenced by the increasing significance of digital media in the lives of young people and the neural correlates of these media activities. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Music from Vassar College.
Lauren Sherman is a quantitative and qualitative researcher who studies social media use in adolescence and across the lifespan. Her research investigates the role of new media and digital communication in shaping socioemotional development, particularly during the adolescent years.
Website: laurenesherman.com
Contact: LinkedIn
Ph.D.
Dr. Juvonen received her Ph.D. from UCLA. She is Professor of Psychology in Developmental Psychology at UCLA. She is an expert on victimization and bullying in elementary and middle school students. Her media research centers on cyberbullying. She studies young teens’ relationships with their peers, and how these relationships are related to the development and adaptive functioning of youth.
One central goal of her work is to understand the conditions and consequences of person-group mismatch. Most of Dr. Juvonen’s research is conducted in schools as she is interested in the effects of student composition (e.g., norms, and homogeneity vs. different forms of diversity) on social-emotional wellbeing.
Web: UCLA Faculty Page
Email: juvonen@psych.ucla.edu
Ph.D.
David Šmahel is associate professor at the Institute for Research of Children, Youth and Family, Faculty of Social Studies within Masaryk University (the Czech Republic). He teaches courses addressing Internet research methodology and the intersection of Psychology and Internet use.
He carries out research focusing on adolescents’ and emerging adults’ Internet use, the construction of online identities, the development of virtual relationships, and the Internet addictive behavior problematic. Dr. Smahel is currently editor of the open-access journal: ‘Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace.’
Contact: Masaryk Uni. Faculty Page
Email: smahel@fss.muni.cz
Ph.D.
Natalia Waechter graduated in Sociology and Political Science at the University of Vienna, is a Professor for Pedagogics and Youth Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich Department for General Pedagogics and Educational Studies. In 2007, when she was a Post-doc at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she participated in research on social networking sites at the Children’s Digital Media Center.
She has researched and published in the areas of youth research, new media and online communication (e.g. chat rooms, social networking sites, text messaging), gender studies and sociology of migration. Since 2006 she is a member of the Excutive Board of Research commitee 34 (Sociology of Youth) of the international Sociological Association (ISA).
Web: LMU Faculty Page
Email: Natalia.Waechter@edu.lmu.de
Ph.D. Student in Education
Davide Cino is a Ph.D. Candidate in Education in Contemporary Society at the University of Milan-Bicocca and a Research Associate at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, where he is working on the ySKILLS (Youth Skills) and CO:RE (Children Online Research and Evidence) Horizon 2020 projects. His main research interests concern children’s online presence and digital skills, digital parenting, and informal learning online.
As part of his doctoral program, he worked as a Visiting Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University with Professor Ellen Wartella and is currently a member of the lab. He is also a member of the Center for Educational Studies on Children and Families at the University of Bologna, and a collaborator of the Children’s Digital Media Center at UCLA and California State University LA. He has collaborated with the Complutense University of Madrid for past research projects.