天美传媒

Damon Centola is The Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering in the Annenberg School for Communication, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

His research addresses social networks and behavior change. His work has been published across several disciplines in journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Sociology, and Journal of Statistical Physics. Centola received the American Sociological Association鈥檚 Award for Outstanding Research in Mathematical Sociology in 2006, 2009, and 2011; the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Centola鈥檚 research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Facebook, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press, and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton University Press, 2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little, Brown, & Co., 2021).

Before coming to Penn, Centola was an Assistant Professor at M.I.T. and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University. His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Heart Association, the National Academies, the U.S. Army, and the NBA. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and CNN.

Emily Falk is a Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania; Director of Penn's Communication Neuroscience Lab; and a Distinguished Fellow of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Falk is an expert in the science of behavior change. Her research uses tools from psychology, neuroscience, and communication to examine what makes messages persuasive, why and how ideas spread, and what makes people effective communicators.

Her research has been recognized by numerous awards, including early career awards from the International Communication Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Attitudes Division, a Fulbright grant, the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the NIH Director鈥檚 New Innovator Award. She was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. She received her bachelor鈥檚 degree in Neuroscience from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

David Lydon-Staley is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Lydon-Staley鈥檚 research focuses on the unfolding of human behavior over short timescales (e.g., moment-to-moment, day-to-day) during the course of everyday life. The ebb and flow of momentary behavior may seem inconsequential, but the minutiae of everyday life, once tallied up over time, become the foundation for more enduring changes in our behavior, environment, and biology that occur on longer (e.g., years, decades) timescales. With this focus on short-term (on the daily or even finer timescales) dynamics in behavior, his research focuses on substance use, emotion regulation, and curiosity across the lifespan, with a particular focus on adolescence. He makes use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), experimental laboratory paradigms, and experience sampling methodologies coupled with intensive-longitudinal data and network analysis techniques.

Lydon-Staley鈥檚 work has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Jacobs Foundation, the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, the Center for Curiosity, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He received his bachelor鈥檚 degree in Psychology and English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and his Ph.D. in Human Development & Family Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Annenberg, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Complex Systems Lab of Professor Danielle Bassett in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

As an Extension Specialist, Dr. Payne's overall goal is to improve health and well-being through research, education, and outreach programs that result in the delivery of quality and sustainable recreation, parks, and wellness programs/services. Her research examines the effects of leisure behavior on aspects of health and well-being among older adults. More specifically, she examines the relationship between leisure style and health of older adults with chronic conditions and the role of local parks and recreation agencies in health promotion and health behavior change. She has directed several statewide outreach and research programs such as the Illinois Rural Recreation Development Project, Illinois Senior Wellness Initiative, Take Charge of Your Health: Live Well be Well, and the Illinois Health Care Reform Initiative. Her work has been supported by the State of Illinois Division of Human Services, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Recreation Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Human behavior is the cause of many environmental, conservation, and societal issues but is also the means to solve them more readily. My lab focuses on human behavior, decision-making, and behavior change in the context of conservation and natural resources management. We use psychology and other social and behavioral science frameworks in combination with survey methods, experiments, and statistical modeling to understand the nature of and reasons for behavior. To inform practice and policy, we study (a) norms, values, and institutions, (b) cognitive, social, and policy processes, and (c) individual and group dynamics.