Ellen Wartella

Ellen A. Wartella (born October 16, 1949 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) is a leading scholar of the role of media in children’s development. She is Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani Professor of Communication Studies, professor of Psychology, of Human Development, and of Behavioral Medicine, and director of the Center on Media and Human Development at Northwestern University, where she has worked since 2010; earlier she was Executive Vice Chancellor, Provost and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, from 2004–2009 and dean of the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin from 1993–2004, where she also held the Walter Cronkite Regents Chair, the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair, and the UNESCO Chair in International Communication.
She received a B.A. with honors from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, and M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1977) degrees from the University of Minnesota. She then taught at Ohio State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before assuming the Texas deanship.
The author or editor of 14 books and approximately 225 book chapters, research articles, technical reports, and research papers, she sits on a variety of national and international advisory boards on children and media, such as the PBS Next Generation Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of the World Summit on Children and Media. She is a trustee of Sesame Workshop. Policy. Wartella has conducted multiple research studies and policy briefs both as a consultant and as a member of study commissions at the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. She has also testified before Congressional committees and made research briefings to Congressional staff and at the White House. Her Center on Media and Human Development holds a policy conference in Washington, D.C. biennially where Wartella releases a major national study on a public policy issue regarding children, youth, and technology. This past spring the conference focused on Teens, Technology and Health. Previous conferences examined Parenting in the Age of Digital Technology and Racial and Ethnic Differences in Children and Adolescents use of Media. All three reports can be found at www.cmhd.northwestern.edu.
She has won research grants from the National Science Foundation (six awards), the Ounce of Prevention Fund, the Hiatt Foundation, the John and Mary Markle Foundation, the National Cable Television Association, the Hogg Foundation, and the Center for Population Options and has served as a consultant to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Markle Foundation,Microsoft Research, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications the Children's Television Workshop, and the U.S. Department of Education. She has testified before the U.S. Senate in an inquiry by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) on a children and media research act, twice before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications, and before the Federal Trade Commission.
Formerly chair of the Front-of-Package Marketing study committee of the Institute of Medicine for the National Science Foundation, she serves on the National Educational Advisory Board of the Children's Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Children Youth and Families. She recently served on the Institute of Medicine's Panel Study on Food Marketing and the Diets of Children and Youth (2006). During 2006-2007 she was the Inaugural Fellow of the Fred Rogers Center. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development and is the past President and Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA). She has received the Aubrey M. Fisher Mentorship Award, the Applied Public Policy Research Award, and the Steven H. Chaffee Career Productivity Award from the ICA, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association and the Krieghbaum Under 40 Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.