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Natalie Bazarova is a Professor of Communication and a field member of Information Science. She is also an Associate Vice Provost for Research and Innovation. Natalie has led multiple research projects on understanding the interplay between communication technology and social behavior in different socio-technical environments, as well as designing and evaluating interventions to enhance online privacy and safety, digital literacy, and prosocial behaviors in social media. By integrating multidisciplinary perspectives, her research examines how people interact with new affordances and modalities of communication technologies and the resulting changes and effects on people’s well-being and social behaviors. These insights have informed her work on building and evaluating tools and interventions to promote safe and productive engagement with technologies for youth and other vulnerable populations, including asylum seekers and refugees, older adults susceptible to information manipulation and cybersecurity risks, teenagers who have experienced digital harms and abuse, and people with psychological distress and history of self-injury. She directs Social Media TestDrive, an experiential digital literacy program dedicated to teaching youth digital literacy skills, and co-directs the Digital and AI Literacy Initiative, whose goal is to design, evaluate, and disseminate community-driven and evidence-based solutions that promote the public’s critical and informed engagement with technologies. |