Watch Teaching Assistant Professor Annie Margaret talk about social media's role in the self esteem of teenagers in this webinar by Forward Together, an organization that develops resources for parent-to-youth and youth-to-youth communication and relationship building.

Margaret investigates the efficacy of specific psychotechnologies and contemplative practices as tools to counteract the negative impact of social media on our mental health and well-being. She is especially interested in social media’s effect on young women. Research suggests that this demographic has various negative mental health outcomes related to life satisfaction, happiness and anxiety. In a, researchers stated that the surge in social media use may be at least in part to blame for the rise in suicide rates in adolescent females, which rose 151 percent from 2009 to 2019, in stark contrast to fairly consistent rates previously (1999-2009). 
 
To address some of the underlying issues behind these disturbing trends, Margaret created a Digital Wellness Summer Program for middle-school girls that provide strategies adolescents can use to minimize the negative psychological impacts of social media.  

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LIvBSzFWs4]

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Kailey Shara

Two teams associated with the ATLAS Institute received awards at the 2022 New Venture Challenge (NVC) 15 Female Founders Prize Night held March 9 at Imig Music.

​Kailey Shara, an ATLAS PhD student and a member of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and her team won third place and $1,000 for Chembotix robotic automation platform, which is designed to dramatically speed up chemistry research and development. 

As a three-time NVC participant, Chembotix was named the first-place winner at last year's NVC Female Founder Prize Night and received the Audience Favorite award at the 2021 championships. Shara also secured two first-place wins associated with ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder's New Venture Launch class ($11,500) taught by Jeff York, associate professor in the Leeds School of Business, and funded by the Robert & Kathleen Dobkin Intuitive Foundation.

Chembotix’s AutoSynth technology is based on Shara’s laboratory automation research. Developed by Shara in the laboratory of Assistant Professor Carson Bruns, the robot automates many of the tedious steps involved in synthesizing new molecules.

Annie Margaret

Annie Margaret, a teaching assistant professor with the ATLAS Institute, and her team placed fourth with Digital Wellness x NoSo November. Digital Wellness aims to help teens build self-esteem and develop skills to manage anxiety and social pressures by promoting an oasis away from social media pressures. In tandem, the NoSo “No Social Media” November campaign encourages everyone to take a month away from their phones and use that time to tend to personal wellness. 

Margaret investigates the efficacy of specific psychotechnologies and contemplative practices as tools to counteract the negative impact of social media on our mental health and well-being. She is especially interested in social media’s effect on young women. Research suggests that this demographic has various negative mental health outcomes related to life satisfaction, happiness and anxiety. In a, researchers stated that the surge in social media use may be at least in part to blame for the rise in suicide rates in adolescent females, which rose 151 percent from 2009 to 2019, in stark contrast to fairly consistent rates previously (1999-2009).
 
To address some of the underlying issues behind these disturbing trends, Margaret created Digital Wellness Summer Programs for middle-school girls ages 12-15, and a second group for high school girls, ages 16-18 that provides strategies adolescents can use to minimize the negative psychological impacts of social media. She and her team have spent the last year conducting focus groups with young women to investigate the effectiveness of various practices and to inform curriculum development, which they will use to make it more effective. The program is funded by a Community Impact Grant through ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder’s Office for Outreach & Engagement.

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With more than 2 billion users globally, the reach and influence of Facebook now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam.  It’s a topic that interests Annie Margaret, a teaching assistant professor with the ATLAS Institute, who investigates how technological innovation impacts society, cognition and human well-being. 

Margaret investigates the efficacy of specific psychological methods and contemplative practices as tools to counteract the negative impact of social media on mental health and well-being. She is especially interested in social media’s effect on young women.  In the summer of 2022, she will be hosting a digital wellness program for students between 11 and 18 years old.

She highlights how for social media platforms, negative content tends to generate the most revenue.

“Attention to social media means money, and the content that gets the most attention tends to invoke rage, comparison, feelings of inadequacy and loneliness,” says Margaret, who teaches two classes at ATLAS–Neurohacking, and Empathy and Technology. Margaret developed those courses; they offer curriculum centered on neurobiology, technology, design and education to both undergraduate and graduate students.   

Acknowledging that social media is here to stay, the goals of the summer program include providing teens with awareness and strategies that promote mental health. “This isn’t going to go away," she says. "The ‘put your phone down’ approach isn’t going to help." 

Digital wellness program provides resources to combat social media's negative psychological impacts

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With more than 2 billion users globally, the reach and influence of Facebook now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam. 
 
It’s a topic that interests Annie Margaret, an instructor at the ATLAS Institute who investigates how technological innovation impacts society, cognition and human well-being.

“Attention to social media means money, and the content that gets the most attention tends to invoke rage, comparison, feelings of inadequacy and loneliness,” says Margaret, who designed and teaches two classes at ATLAS–Neurohacking, and Empathy and Technology.  “This impacts us all.”
 
Margaret investigates the efficacy of specific psychotechnologies and contemplative practices as tools to counteract the negative impact of social media on our mental health and well-being. She is especially interested in social media’s effect on young women. Research suggests that this demographic has various negative mental health outcomes related to life satisfaction, happiness and anxiety. In a, researchers stated that the surge in social media use may be at least in part to blame for the rise in suicide rates in adolescent females, which rose 151 percent from 2009 to 2019, in stark contrast to fairly consistent rates previously (1999-2009). 
 
To address some of the underlying issues behind these disturbing trends, Margaret created a Digital Wellness Summer Program for middle-school girls that provide strategies adolescents can use to minimize the negative psychological impacts of social media. She and her team are gathering data on the impact of the curricula, which they will use to make it more effective.

The program is funded by a Community Impact Grant through ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder’s Office for Outreach & Engagement. 

“This program provides young people with the skills to resist the emotional hijacking perpetrated through smartphones and social media," Margaret says. "Building resilience will give them the agency to choose where they give their attentional and emotional resources."

The Program
Grant funds pay community partners and graduate and undergraduate students involved in the program, as well as purchasing materials. Student researchers will be recruited through MS CTD-Social Impact track and from Margaret’s classes.

During the summer, females aged 10 to 14 were identified to join a curriculum-development focus group. The focus group is conducted in partnership with students from Title I middle schools in the Boulder Valley School District and middle-school students from Dawson Summer Initiative, a tuition-free program that provides academic opportunities for high-achieving public middle-school students from Boulder County and surrounding areas.

Annie Margaret

“As long as social media companies profit from addiction, preying on our basic human need for social belonging, our attention will continue to be exploited without our consent, and our emotions manipulated without our awareness,” Margaret says.
 
“Assessment is critical to the success of this project,” she continues. “We are creating an evidence-based curriculum that provides the resources young people need to thrive in the rapidly growing attention economy.”

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In the 2017-2018 academic year, ATLAS welcomes four new faculty members to its growing roster of researchers and educators. With research and industry experience in chemistry, industrial design and engineering, human-computer interaction and science storytelling, these new faculty members expand the institute’s range of research groups, which already included human-robot interaction, playful computation, smart textiles, information technology for social impact, and typography and visible language.

“We are delighted to welcome these outstanding new faculty members to ATLAS, where we are inventing the future,” says Mark D Gross, who directs the institute. “At ATLAS we believe that some of the most powerful ideas will come from those who play across traditional discipline boundaries. By bringing together leaders in diverse fields, we enable opportunities for radical invention and creativity.”

Annie Bruns

Annie Bruns’s work combines technology with storytelling to investigate emotions and learning in the sciences. Creating vivid stories and wild performances that inspire powerful feelings, she explores how strong emotional responses influence classroom learning for different levels of learning objectives: lower, such as recalling facts and formulas; and higher, such as identifying connections between ideas and generating original work. She says she dreams of conveying complex scientific information via performance art that combines visual and audio technology with music, dance, theater and audience participation. Bruns received a Bachelor of Arts in biology from Luther College and a doctorate in molecular biology from Northwestern University. Annie joins the faculty in January.

Carson Bruns

Carson Bruns is a scientist, writer and artist.  His research interests span organic, inorganic, polymer and biochemistry, as well as materials science and engineering; his artwork embraces digital / computer art, illustration, painting, photography and body art. He has specialized in synthesizing artificial molecules because he is endlessly fascinated by the idea that he can dream up a molecule so exotic and energetically costly to make that it has probably never existed in the universe, and then to actually make it. The nanostructures he builds are immensely beautiful, though too small to see. Working with his doctoral advisor Fraser Stoddart, he co-authored the book, “The Nature of the Mechanical Bond: from Molecules to Machines.”  Bruns received a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and religion from Luther College, and a doctorate in organic chemistry from Northwestern University. He was most recently a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Carson joined the faculty in August.

Ellen Yi-Luen Do

Ellen Do, an architect-turned-computer scientist, comes to ATLAS from Georgia Tech, where she was a professor of industrial design and interactive computing, and from the National University of Singapore, where she directed a 25-person research center in ubiquitous computing. She is committed to designing and building better creative design computing tools, starting from understanding the human intelligence and creativity involved in the design process. A unifying theme of much of her research is improving interactions with computers, taking them beyond the desktop and into the physical world. One recent project, Things that Think, Spaces that Sense, and Places that Play, involves smart living environments with computing technologies embedded in the built environment to support happier and healthier living. She has conducted research in computer-aided architectural design, especially sketch-based computing, creativity support tools and design studies, tangible and embedded interaction, and computing for health. Do received a Bachelor of Architecture from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, a Master of Design degree from Harvard University, and a doctorate in design computing from Georgia Institute of Technology. Do joined the faculty in August.

Daniel Leithinger

Daniel Leithinger’s research in human-computer interaction focuses on the design and development of novel shape-changing computer interfaces, challenging the dominance of flat, graphical displays by designing physically transforming material interfaces that react to touching, grasping and deforming. Motivated by current shifts towards democratizing computer‐aided design, his work gives users access to powerful consumer hardware for sensing, modifying and printing 3D data. Leithinger’s research encompasses developing custom hardware platforms, designing spatial interactions, and creating toolkits for kinetic interaction design. Leithinger received Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in digital media and media design and technology from Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and Master, and a PhD in media arts and sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leithinger joins the faculty in January.

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