Risk and Resilience: Promoting Adolescent Online Safety and Privacy through Human-Centered Computing

April 3. 2024 3:00-4:00 pm. WWH 335. Dr. Wisniewski’s research expertise is situated at the juxtaposition of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Computing, Privacy, and Online Safety. She views privacy as a social mechanism that helps people regulate their interpersonal boundaries with others in a way that facilitates more meaningful connections and safer online interactions with others. Her research focuses on: 1) teen-centric approaches for online safety that promote self-regulation and empower teens to effectively manage online risks, 2) online safety interventions that protect youth, particularly those who are most vulnerable (e.g., autistic and foster youth), from severe online risks, such as sexual predation, and 3) community-based approaches for helping all people (e.g., children to older adults) co-manage their online privacy and safety with people they trust. She has become a leading HCI scholar at the intersections of adolescent online safety, developmental science, interaction design, and human-centered computing. She has created an exciting research program that intertwines research and education to engage teens, college students, experts in adolescent psychology, experts in participatory design and research methods, community partners, and industry stakeholders in a community-based effort to build the village needed to protect our youth from online risks by empowering them to protect themselves. During her talk, Dr. Wisniewski will give an overview of her on-going grant-funded research, as well as her career-long aspirations to education and empower people through human-centered computing. Dr. Wisniewski considers herself a “scholar activist,” who is someone committed to scholarly research and scientific rigor, but equally committed to their situations of origin and are passionate about making the world a better place through their learned experience.

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and a Flowers Family Fellow in Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Computing and Information Systems from UNC Charlotte.