School of Humanities and Sciences


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  • Nilam Ram

    Nilam Ram

    Professor of Communication and of Psychology

    BioNilam Ram studies the dynamic interplay of psychological and media processes and how they change from moment-to-moment and across the life span.

    Nilam’s research grows out of a history of studying change. After completing his undergraduate study of economics, he worked as a currency trader, frantically tracking and trying to predict the movement of world markets as they jerked up, down and sideways. Later, he moved on to the study of human movement, kinesiology, and eventually psychological processes - with a specialization in longitudinal research methodology. Generally, Nilam studies how short-term changes (e.g., processes such as learning, information processing, emotion regulation, etc.) develop across the life span, and how longitudinal study designs contribute to generation of new knowledge. Current projects include examinations of age-related change in children’s self- and emotion-regulation; patterns in minute-to-minute and day-to-day progression of adolescents’ and adults’ emotions; and change in contextual influences on well-being during old age. He is developing a variety of study paradigms that use recent developments in data science and the intensive data streams arriving from social media, mobile sensors, and smartphones to study change at multiple time scales.

  • Byron Reeves

    Byron Reeves

    Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and Professor, by courtesy, of Education

    BioByron Reeves, PhD, is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford and
    Professor (by courtesy) in the Stanford School of Education. Byron has a long history of
    experimental research on the psychological processing of media, and resulting responses and
    effects. He has studied how media influence attention, memory and emotional responses and has
    applied the research in the areas of speech dialogue systems, interactive games, advanced
    displays, social robots, and autonomous cars. Byron has recently launched (with Stanford
    colleagues Nilam Ram and Thomas Robinson) the Human Screenome Project (Nature, 2020),
    designed to collect moment-by-moment changes in technology use across applications, platforms
    and screens.

    At Stanford, Byron has been Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information,
    and Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced
    Research), and he was the founding Director of mediaX at Stanford, a university-industry
    program launched in 2001 to facilitate discussion and research at the intersection of academic
    and applied interests. Byron has worked at Microsoft Research and with several technology
    startups, and has been involved with media policy at the FTC, FCC, US Congress and White
    House. He is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association, and recipient of ICA Fellows book award for The Media Equation (with Prof. Clifford Nass), and the Novim Foundation Epiphany Science and Society Award. Byron’s PhD in Communication is from Michigan State University.

  • Donald Roberts

    Donald Roberts

    Thomas More Storke Professor, Emeritus

    BioDonald Roberts received his A.B. from Columbia University (1961) and his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1963). He earned his Ph.D. in communication at Stanford in 1968, then became a member of the department faculty, serving as Director of the Institute for Communication Research from 1985-1990 and from 1999-2001. He chaired the department from 1990-1996.

    Roberts teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on communication theory and research and on children, youth, and media. His primary area of research concerns how children and adolescents use and respond to media, a topic on which he has written extensively (e.g., chapters in The Handbook of Communication, Learning from Television: Psychological and Education Research, The International Encyclopedia of Communications, The Handbook of Children and the Media,and The Handbook of Adolescent Psychology).

    He has also written comprehensive reviews of the literature on the effects of mass communication for the Annual Review of Psychology and for the revised edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology, and co-authored a chapter on public opinion processes in the Handbook of Communication Science.

    Roberts helped to design a parental advisory system to label violence, sex/nudity, and language for the computer software industry which has been adapted by the Internet Content Rating Association for use on the World Wide Web. He has spoken on the issue of content labeling and advisories internationally (e.g., Mexico, Korea, Australia, South Africa), and has published several articles dealing with content labeling.

    He has consulted with a number of companies involved in producing children’s media (e.g., Filmation, ABC-Disney, MGM Animation, Sunbow Entertainment, Nelvana Ltd., and KidsWB!), and currently functions as Educational Director for DIC Entertainment, helping to develop content to meet the FCC’s requirements for educational programming for children. Roberts also served on the board of advisors of MediaScope, a nonprofit organization founded to promote constructive depictions of social issues in film, television, music, and video games, and was a planner and panelist for Vice President Al Gore’s Conference on Families and Media.

    Roberts is co-editor of The Process and Effects of Mass Communication and co-author of Television and Human Behavior, It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: Popular Music in the Lives of Adolescents and Kids on Media in America: Patterns of Use at the Millennium.