Risk and Resilience: Promoting Privacy and Online Safety by Empowering People through Human-Centered Computing

Talk
Pamela Wisniewski
Talk Series: 
Time: 
03.15.2023 10:15 to 11:15

As a multi-racial woman from a low socioeconomic status family and a first-generation college graduate, Dr. Wisniewski’s has had to learn how to be resilient in order to succeed. Her adverse life experiences allowed her to developed empathy and a deeper understanding of the importance of diversity and equity that ultimately motivated her become 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. Currently, Dr. Wisniewski is an endowed, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. She is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar whose research lies at the intersection of Social Computing and Privacy. Her passion lies in empowering people, particularly vulnerable and underserved populations, by leveraging human-centered computing. She is an expert in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents and was one of the first researchers to recognize the need for a resilience-based approach, rather than an abstinence-based approaches for keeping teens safe online. In both her professional career as well as her research, Dr. Wisniewski pushes the acceptable boundaries of who should be included in academia and in computing fields, so that we, as scholar activists, can facilitate real societal change that is inclusive of our differences.