As the director of engagement and strategy for the Center for Digital Thriving, Lauren is thrilled to work alongside the bright minds championing youth voices and digital agency.
PZ Work
Lauren serves as the director of strategy and engagement at the Center for Digital Thriving—a research and innovation center at Project Zero that bridges the gap between research on teens and screens and classroom practice. She helps amplify the team's work to shift the conversation around youth, technology, and digital thriving.
She loves connecting the dots between mainstream narratives and what the center is hearing directly from youth and the educators who support them. She explored some of these themes in "Three for Thriving," a limited video series that examined trending headlines alongside research insights and youth perspectives.
Through her work, Lauren shines a light on the center's research team by supporting them in conversations with media, collaborators, and educators who want to bring critical optimism and digital agency into their classrooms. She also helps shape and share the center’s "Youth Voice Memos" and scale educator-facing resources like "8 Mindshifts for Teaching Digital Well-Being"—an on-demand professional learning course that helps teachers pivot from tech referee to digital thriving coach (and other transformative shifts!).
Beyond PZ
Lauren has loved telling stories for as long as she can remember and feels grateful to work in communications, which allows her to help organizations share their ethos and offerings. After a decade in tech, she intentionally shifted into the youth well-being and technology research space. She says, "It felt like a perfect remix of my experience in tech and my care for young people’s well-being."
Lauren's PZ Pick
The CDT's "Design Tricks" video and related lesson plan invite young people to reflect on how tech design choices are not neutral and how to navigate those tricks with intentionality.