National Advisory Board

Ellen Ann Wartella, Ph.D.

Dr. Wartella is Professor of Communication Studies and of Psychology at Northwestern University. Ellen is a leading scholar of the role of media in children's development. Currently she is a co-principal investigator on a 5-year multi-site research project entitled: "IRADS Collaborative Research: Influence of Digital Media on Very Young Children" funded by the National Science Foundation (2006-2011).

She was a co-principal investigator on the National TV Violence Study (1995-1998) and a co-principal investigator of the Children's Digital Media Center project funded by the National Science Foundation (2001-2006). She serves on the Board of Trustees of Sesame Workshop, the National Educational Advisory Board of the Children's Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and Harvard's Center on Children's Media and Children's Health. Ellen recently served on the Institute of Medicine's Panel Study on Food Marketing and the Diets of Children and Youth (2006) and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Children, Youth, and Families (2002 - 2007). During 2006-2007, she was the Inaugural Senior Fellow of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media. Ellen is a member of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research in Child Development and is the past President of the International Communication Association. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. Between July 2004 and March 2009, she was the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Riverside and between 1993 and 2004 was Dean of the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Ellen earned her Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and completed her postdoctoral research in developmental psychology in 1981 at the University of Kansas.