Stevie Chancellor wins NSF CAREER Award
Department of Computer Science & Engineering’s (CS&E) Assistant Professor Stevie Chancellor has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her project, “Redesigning Engagement Infrastructure On Social Media For Well-Being.” This prestigious award provides support to early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
“I’m thrilled to receive the NSF CAREER award to support our lab’s research on building better social media technology that safeguards mental health,” Chancellor said. “Although raw screen time is a factor in social media’s impact on well-being, we think that other features like infinite scroll and video content are to blame for bad mental health outcomes. This project will let us identify what mechanisms hurt well-being and then build better tools to protect it.”
Throughout her research, Chancellor builds and evaluates human-centered AI for mental health in online interactions. This project looks to develop AI models to better identify how people use and respond to social media content. The goal is to enable early detection of possible harm to an individual’s well-being. These detection models will then be added into tools people can use to think about the benefits and risks of social media. It also looks to create new, less harmful designs for social media.
“One of the things I’m most excited for with this research is public scholarship and outreach beyond research audiences,” Chancellor said. “A major part of this project will be talking to key stakeholders, like tech companies and policymakers, and the public about the benefits and risks of social media for well-being.”
Chancellor joined the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in 2021 as an assistant professor. She received her MA in communication, culture and technology from Georgetown University in 2014 and her PhD in human-centered computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2019. Chancellor received multiple Best Paper and Honorable Mentions for her publications, and recently earned a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. She is widely cited in the popular press, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, for her expertise in mental health and AI systems. Prior to her time at the University of Minnesota, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University from 2019 to 2021.
“I’m grateful for the support of my lab and my PhD students, who are the drivers of this fantastic work. I’m looking forward to the impacts this work will have on the public conversation about mental health and social media.”
Learn more about Chancellor’s work on her personal website or Substack, and watch her 2025 TED Talk.