Dr. Jessica Taylor Piotrowski (Ph.D, 2010, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She is the Director of the Center for research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media (CcaM), the Program Group Leader for Youth & Media Entertainment at ASCoR, and the Program Director for the Master’s Degree Entertainment Communication at the Graduate School of Communication at UvA. She is also the incoming Chair of the Children, Adolescents, and the Media division of the International Communication Association.
Dr. Piotrowski’s research investigates how children process and comprehend media content, with specific attention to the potential cognitive and socio-emotional benefits of media. She is currently a co-investigator on the project, The Entertainization of Childhood, where she is investigating the longitudinal outcomes associated with healthy media use on children’s development. She is also co-supervising a doctoral program looking at the educational potential of apps for young children. In her scholarship, she is particularly focused on understanding how young users process media content (cognitively, affectively, and physiologically) and the role of individual differences (dispositional, developmental, and social) in the selection and processing of media content.
Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, Dr. Piotrowski worked as a Research Associate in the Media & the Developing Child research group at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. She also worked as a Research Fellow for the Children’s Media Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she directed several experimental investigations of children’s learning from television.
Dr. Piotrowski frequently speaks at academic and trade conferences on the role of media in the lives of young people today. Moreover, with a strong belief in forging the divide between academic scholarship and societal practice, Dr. Piotrowski often shares her work in higher education classrooms, at public policy organizations, at children’s media organizations, and with childcare providers both in the Netherlands and worldwide. She is the co-author of the forthcoming open access book Plugged In: How Media Attract and Affect Youth (Yale University Press, 2017), and regularly publishes in communication, psychology, and education journals.
(From Official Site)