Speakers
Nick Ballou, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Nick Ballou is a research psychologist at the University of Oxford and one of the world's leading young experts in how media usage affects mental health—for example, effects like stress relief, displacement, and nostalgia. He develops creative methods to collect detailed behavioral data from platforms (e.g., Xbox, TikTok), and use this data to understand the key ingredients in a healthy digital diet with a focus on causality, not correlations. A broader goal of Nick's work is to make psychological research more rigorous, trustworthy, and actionable as part of the science reform movement. He is a postdoc at the Oxford Internet Institute, having recently finished his PhD at Queen Mary University of London.