Laura Marciano
Assistant Professor
Contact Information
Research and Creative Interests
- Adolescence
- Mental Health
- Media Psychology
- AI
- Social Neuroscience
Biography
Dr. Laura Marciano is an Assistant Professor at the Media School, Indiana University Bloomington, and an associate at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. She continues to collaborate with the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she previously spent nearly four years as a postdoctoral researcher and research associate.
Her research focuses on how digital media use affects well-being, especially for adolescents. She leads the HappyB and HappyB2.0 projects, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which explore links between smartphone and social media use and teen well-being using tools like surveys, smartphone data, and digital biomarkers. She also co-leads the Health&Happiness project, which studies well-being using smartphone and wearable data across multiple populations.
She is also active in science communication, serving on the Board of the IBSA Foundation for Scientific Research and authoring Smartphone: Ally or Enemy?. Through projects like Happiness2.0, she works to translate research findings into public events and activities combining arts and science. She is also a speaker at WOHASU and her work has been highlighted in the New York Times.
Dr. Marciano earned her Ph.D. in Health Communication (summa cum laude) at USI Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland, where her dissertation on problematic digital media use and personality received the Italian Embassy in Bern’s Award for Best Doctoral Thesis in Social Sciences. She previously studied Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, graduating with distinction (Laude) and Menzione d’Onore.