Ellen Wartella, PhD
Ellen Wartella is Al-Thani Professor of Communication, Professor of Psychology
and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern
University. She is a leading scholar of the role of media in children’s
development and serves on a variety of national and international boards and
committees on children’s issues. She is co-principal investigator of the Children’s
Digital Media Center project funded by the National Science Foundation (20012011) and was co-principle investigator on the National TV Violence Study (19951998). She has published widely in communication and psychology journals on
children’s media issues.
Dr. Wartella earned her PhD 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. She was dean of the College of
Communication at the University of Texas from 1993-2004 and Executive Vice
Chancellor and Provost at the University of California-Riverside from 2004-2009.
Before joining the faculty at Northwestern in March 2010 she was Distinguished
Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Riverside.
Dr. Wartella currently serves on the Board of the World Summit Foundation, the
Academic Advisory Board of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the
Council of Better Business Bureaus, the advisory boards of the Rudd Center on
Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity at Yale University and the Center on
Media and Children’s Health at Harvard University. She is a Trustee of Sesame
Workshop and serves on the PBS Kids Advisory Board.
She is a past member of the Board on Children, Youth and Families at the
National Academy of Sciences and served on the National Academy of
Sciences/ Institute of Medicine’s Study on Food Marketing and the Diets of
Children and Youth (2006). She currently chairs the Committee on Examination
of Front of Pack Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols (2010-2011) at the Institute
of Medicine. She is also a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on
Accelerating Progress in Obesity Research (2010-2012). She is a member of the
American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child
Development and is past president of the International Communication
Association.