About Us

This project is led by a team of interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Central Florida, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Boston University. Our research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant #IIP-1827700. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Research Team


Pamela J. Wisniewski

Dr. Wisniewski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and Director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Lab at UCF. Her research expertise lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Social Media, and Privacy. Her goal is to help people meaningfully engage with one another online, and to do so safely. Her work has received Best Paper Awards at ACM SigCHI conferences. She is the lead researcher on this project, if you need to contact her please email her at pamwis@ucf.edu










Munmun De Choudhury

Dr. De Choudhury is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She is also affiliated with the Graphics and Visualization Center (GVU), Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and the Machine Learning Center (ML@GT) at Georgia Tech. Trained as a computer scientist, she is passionate about problems at the intersection of computer science and social science, and therefore, she builds computational methods and artefacts to make sense of human behavior and psychological state, as manifested via our online social footprints. She is motivated by how the availability of large-scale online social data, with the amalgamation of advances in machine learning and grounding in human-centered approaches can help us answer fundamental questions relating to social lives, particularly health and well-being.









Gianluca Stringhini

Gianluca Stringhini is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University. Before joining BU, he was faculty at University College London. Gianluca works in the area of data-driven security, analyzing large datasets to better understand complex malicious online operations and developing mitigation techniques to fight them. He was awarded a Facebook Secure the Internet Grant in 2018, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2015, the Symantec Research Labs Fellowship in 2012, and multiple Best Paper Awards, including one at eCrime 2017. He has published in top security conferences such as CCS, NDSS, and USENIX Security, as well as top measurement and Web conferences such as IMC, ICWSM, and WWW.










Kimberley Gryglewicz

Dr. Kimberley Gryglewicz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, with an MSW degree. She is trained in mental health; suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention; de-escalation skills; and, therapeutic approaches commonly used in clinical settings. She has worked in child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health (inpatient psychiatric), hospital and hospice settings providing direct clinical intervention to children, adolescents, families/caregivers, adults and the elderly. Additionally, she has conducted countless interviews and focus groups with children, adolescents and parents on sensitive topics such as mental health, risky behaviors, and suicidality and have supervised suicide prevention specialists as they provided basic and advanced suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention training to close to 25,000 youth, families, community members, and professionals across Florida. She has also developed research protocols to safeguard risk, specifically as it related to mental health/emotional distress, self-harm and suicide risk.













Elizabeth Cauffman

Elizabeth Cauffman is a Professor in the Department of Psychological Science in the School of Social Ecology and holds courtesy appointments in the School of Education and the School of Law. Dr. Cauffman received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Temple University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University. At the broadest level, Dr. Cauffman’s research addresses the intersect between adolescent development and juvenile justice. She has published over 100 articles, chapters, and books on a range of topics in the study of contemporary adolescence, including adolescent brain development, risk-taking and decision-making, parent-adolescent relationships, and juvenile justice.















Afsaneh Razi

Afsaneh Razi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. She is a member of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Lab at UCF. Her current research is to improve adolescent online safety utilizing human-centered machine learning approaches. This is part an NSF funded project to improve online risk detection algorithms for adolescents.











Heidi Hartikainen

Heidi is a postdoctoral scholar supporting prof. Wisniewski in her research concerning adolescent online safety. She has previously obtained an MSc and PhLic in computer and systems science from Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, and a Ph.D. in Information processing science from Oulu University in Finland.












Zainab Agha

Zainab is an ORC Doctoral Fellow, pursuing her Ph.D. in Computer Science. With an interest in Human-Computer Interaction and Online Safety, she aims to define and counter online risks faced by adolescents, in order to make the Internet a safer place.












Neeraj Chatlani

Neeraj is a Ph.D. student at the University of Central Florida, advised by Dr. Pamela Wisniewski. Within STIR Lab he works to develop models of online risk for adolescents and teens.













Seunghyun Kim

Seunghyun Kim (Matt) is a CS PhD student advised by Dr. Munmun De Choudhury. He is interested in detecting emotions through social media posts and social embeddings to help understand and improve mental health. His most recent research studied the influence of different perspectives on cyberbullying detection.












Shiza Ali

Shiza Ali is a Ph.D. student at Boston University. She is a member of the Security Lab (SeclaBU) at BU. Her research involves computational social science and online safety. She aims to better understand online systems and the way in which people interact with them and misuse them.