Dr. Alex Russell is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Research Scientist at the Recovery Research Institute and National Center on Youth Prevention, Treatment and Recovery within Massachusetts General Hospital. He is broadly interested in the intersection of media, technology, and alcohol use disorder (AUD) prevention, treatment, and recovery. His research, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), leverages data from popular social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, TikTok) to explore the nature and influence of social media on alcohol-related behaviors with the goal of informing public health interventions intended to mobilize treatment and recovery service engagement among young adults with AUD.
Alice E. Marwick (PhD, New York University) is the Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular technologies using ethnographic, qualitative, and critical methods. Marwick’s award-winning book, The Private is Political (Yale 2023), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and socio-economic status. In 2017, Marwick co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, a flagship report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of 2017’s Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. She is also the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013) and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017). Previously, Dr. Marwick was Microsoft Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and principal researcher at its Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, which she co-founded.
Catherine B. Gray, PharmD
Catherine Gray leads the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) in the Office of Medical Policy (OMP) at FDA. Her diverse team of professionals focuses on the challenging and evolving policy and operational issues pertaining to prescription drug promotion. She oversees policy development, social science research, compliance activities, labeling development, stakeholder engagement, and operational support to the office as it realizes its mission to protect the public health. She previously worked in clinical pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Gray earned a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame, a Doctor of Pharmacy from Campbell University, and completed several fellowships.
Haoning Xue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. She received her PhD in Communication with a designated emphasis in Computational Social Science from the University of California, Davis. She uses computational and experimental approaches to examine and intervene in digital (mis)information production and consumption across health and science contexts. Her current project focuses on using short videos for health persuasion with computer vision analysis and online experiments. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and Google Cloud.
Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Her research spans issues of bias, trust, security, autonomy, and accountability in digital systems, most notably, privacy as contextual integrity. Professor Nissenbaum’s publications include the books Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010). These, along with numerous research articles, have been translated into seven languages, including Polish, Chinese, and Portuguese. She received the 2014 Barwise Prize from the American Philosophical Association and the IACAP Covey Award for computing, ethics, and philosophy. Professor Nissenbaum has also contributed to privacy-enhancing free software, such as TrackMeNot (designed to prevent the profiling of web search histories) and AdNauseam (designed to counter profiling based on ad clicks). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Joan Donovan, PhD, is an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. She is the founder of The Critical Internet Studies Institute, a nonprofit based in Boston that advocates for a public interest internet. Dr. Donovan’s research explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. She conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns. She is the coauthor of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, with Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg.
Kerry O’Brien is the Regional Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Western Region in San Francisco.
As a 34-year veteran at the FTC, Kerry has participated in a wide variety of Commission matters, many involving deceptive advertising, deceptive privacy/data security policies, various frauds/scams, and anticompetitive conduct and mergers.
Kerry supervises the San Francisco office’s consumer protection and competition casework. She regularly speaks on a wide variety of consumer protection and competition topics.
Kerry received her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and her law degree from UC Davis School of Law, where she was a member of the Order of the Coif and Law Review.
Marco Zenone (he/him) is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He also is a Research Associate at the University of Alberta Health Law Institute. He completed his PhD in Public Health & Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His PhD thesis focused on exploring the role of digital platforms, such as social media platforms, search engines, and e-commerce platforms, for their vested interests and role in the propagation and promotion of unproven and exploitive cancer treatments online. Dr. Zenone’s current research program focuses on the public health implications of emerging technologies with an emphasis on platforms, health disinformation, health discourse, artificial intelligence, and online portrayals of health. Dr. Zenone’s research program is guided by the commercial and determinants of health. He has published 32 peer-reviewed research articles in high impact journals such as the BMJ, American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, JAMA Network Open, and Globalization and Health. Dr. Zenone regularly gives commentary to news outlets and his research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Verge, The Toronto Star, and CBC.
Timothy Caulfield is a Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. He was the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy for over 20 years (2002 - 2023). His interdisciplinary research on topics like stem cells, genetics, research ethics, the public representations of science, and public health policy has allowed him to publish almost 400 academic articles. He has won numerous academic, science communication, and writing awards, and is a Member of the Order Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He contributes frequently to the popular press and is the author of two national bestsellers: The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness (Penguin 2012) and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash (Penguin 2015). His most recent book is Relax, Dammit!: A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety (Penguin Random House, 2020). Caulfield is also the co-founder of the science engagement initiative #ScienceUpFirst and has hosted and produced documentaries, including the award-winning TV show, A User’s Guide to Cheating Death, which has been shown in over 60 countries, including streaming on Netflix in North America.
Yingdan Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, and co-director of the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab. Her research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation. She uses computational and qualitative methods to understand the evolution and engagement of digital propaganda in authoritarian regimes and how individuals encounter and communicate multimodal information in AI-mediated environments. Her work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals across communication, political science, and human-computer interaction. She received her Ph.D. in Communication and a Ph.D. minor in Political Science from Stanford University.
