The 10th Annual Promoting Research in Social Media and Health Symposium (PRISM) was held on December 3, 2025, at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Marking a decade of PRISM, the symposium brought together more than 80 researchers, clinicians, trainees, and industry partners to reflect on progress in social media and health research and to consider future directions in an evolving digital landscape.
PRISM founder and co-chair Dr. Urmimala Sarkar, a Professor at UCSF, opened the meeting with a land acknowledgment, followed by welcoming remarks that outlined the purpose and goals of the symposium. Dr. Sarkar emphasized PRISM’s shared commitment to utilizing social media research to enhance public health, foster novel perspectives, promote open discussion of challenges, and facilitate new collaborations. She also reflected on lessons from the past decade, including the reinforcing relationship between social media and health beliefs, the role of peer networks and professional content, and the promise and difficulty of evaluating social media-based interventions. PRISM co-chair Dr. Jon-Patrick Allem, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, encouraged attendees to engage actively across panels, rapid-fire presentations, poster sessions, and informal networking, and acknowledged the PRISM team and sponsors.
Poster Session
The poster session featured 13 presentations highlighting research on substance use, youth health, health messaging, and digital methods, demonstrating how social media data and platforms can inform surveillance, recruitment, and equitable public health interventions.
Panel 1: Looking Back and Moving Forward
The opening panel examined how social media and health research have evolved over the past decade. Dr. Sarkar reviewed significant advances, including the use of social media for real-time public health surveillance, predictive insights from language and online behavior, and evidence of social contagion in beliefs and behaviors. Panelists discussed the field’s shift from early descriptive methods to more advanced machine learning, computer vision, and large language model-based approaches, alongside increasing challenges related to data access, platform commercialization, and distinguishing authentic discourse from algorithmically amplified content. The panel emphasized the need for multidisciplinary collaboration, methodological rigor, and sustainable research models.
Panel 2: Data Access
This panel focused on barriers and opportunities in accessing social media data for research. Speakers discussed academic-industry partnerships, startup collaborations, and the untapped potential of digital health data, including onboarding assessments and A/B testing results. Panelists emphasized the importance of trust, transparency, and ethical governance, as well as emerging models such as secure data enclaves, intermediary partnerships, and regulatory frameworks that strike a balance between privacy and research access.
Rapid Fire Presentations
Rapid-fire talks showcased innovative work from early-career researchers, including multi-scale disease modeling for substance misuse using Reddit data, diabetes education on TikTok for Latino communities, the relationship between cybervictimization and adolescent sleep quality, and computational methods to identify youth appeal in tobacco marketing. Together, these presentations demonstrated the creative application of computational and mixed methods to pressing public health questions.
Panel 3: Ethical Issues in Social Media Research
The final panel addressed ethical challenges related to donated and crowdsourced social media data, algorithm auditing, and participant protection. Speakers explored whether data donors should be considered research subjects or citizen scientists and emphasized that raw data carries inherent risk. Panelists stressed the importance of meticulous study design, transparency, and robust safeguards to protect individuals who contribute data.
Closing Reflections
The 10th Annual PRISM Health Symposium highlighted both the progress achieved and the challenges ahead. Across sessions, common themes emerged around innovation, ethics, collaboration, and sustainability. As social media continues to shape health behaviors and beliefs, PRISM remains a critical forum for advancing rigorous, ethical research that promotes public health in the digital age.
PRISM 2025 Awards
Best Rapid-Fire Presentation by a non-trainee: George Pearson
Best Rapid-Fire Presentation by a trainee: Christopher Chae
Best Poster Presentation by a non-trainee: Scott Donaldson
Best Poster Presentation by a trainee: Tylar Schmitt
Special thanks to our sponsors (UCSF Action Research Center for Health, Rutgers Health Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies, UCSF Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation, UCSF Proctor Foundation for Research in Ophthalmology); steering committee (Dr. Urmimala Sarkar, Dr. Jon Patrick-Allem, Thomas Bukowski, Dr. Sylvia Chou, Dr. Valentin Danchev, Dr. Michael Deiner, Dr. Scott Donaldson, Dr. Cesar Escobar-Viera, Dr. Jhaimy Fernandez, Dr. Yulin Hswen, Dr. Pamela Ling, Dr. Sunny Liu, Dr. Tim Mackey, Dr. Philip Massey, Dr. Meredith Meacham, Dr. Thu Nguyen, Dr. George Pearson, Dr. Alex Russell, Dr. Rahul Singh, Dr. Elyse Thulin, Dr. Molly Waring, Dr. Marco Zenone); event staff (Leslie Avilez, Faviola Garcia, Christian Gutierrez, Sara Guzman-Estrada, Vlad Honcharov, Cindy Kim, Jorge Larreynaga, Eric Li, Isabel Luna, Adriana Mejia Lopez, Monica Naranjo, Kristan Olazo, Maria Plascencia-Mooradian, Nilpa Shah, Socorro Trujillo, Jeanette Wong, Andersen Yang); MBCC staff (Rebecca Mauricio, Nick Vogel); Fog City Audio Visual (Doug Watson); photographer (Cindy Chew); and catering (Moffitt Catering).