Director/Principal Investigator, Senior Research Scientist

Dr. Linda Charmaraman is a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) at Wellesley College and received her PhD in Human Development and Education from University of California Berkeley. She is director of the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Children & Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others. Linda’s research interests include social media and adolescent health, digital citizenship, methodologies to target hard-to-reach populations, and how social identities (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political) affect wellbeing. She has been surveying a cohort of over 1000 middle school students into their high school years and beyond since before the pandemic, focused on adolescent social tech use, health, wellbeing, and civic engagement. Media mentions include New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Good Morning America, USA Today, ABC News, NBC News, Discover Magazine, The Conversation, and others. In 2023, Dr. Charmaraman provided written testimony for the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing regarding Protecting Our Children Online. She was also a proud member of the task force for the 2023 American Psychological Association’s health advisory on social media use in adolescence. She is featured in a PBS Learning online toolkit series on adolescent social media use, sponsored by the New York State Education Department. Together with a youth advisory board, she co-organizes free Digital Wellbeing workshops for middle school girls from underserved backgrounds across the nation each summer (wcwonline.org/summerworkshops).

Alyssa Gramajo is a Research Associate at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. At WCW, Gramajo supports the work of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab as the project coordinator for data collection. In this capacity, Gramajo is a liaison to schools overseeing recruitment and scheduling, data management, dissemination projects, and manuscript editing. She also works closely with the lab’s Wellesley College student research assistants and interns.

Wellesley College Department of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Lab and Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) program

Catherine co-leads the Youth, Media, & Wellbeing Research Lab activities pertaining to summer STEM workshops and developing apps for healthy social media use in middle school. Her research interests focus on how people relate to each other through social technologies and the social implications of our increasing dependence on the internet.

Maya is a postdoctoral researcher with the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Lab. Her multi-method research interests focus on the psychosocial risks and benefits of historically underrepresented adolescent’s social technology use and applying the social ecological framework to adolescence in the digital age. She also has experience working in nonprofit management for youth programs around civic engagement and storytelling.