Candice Odgers

Candice Odgers is Associate Dean for Research and a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Informatics at the University of California Irvine. She co-directs both the Child & Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and CERES, an international network evaluating the impact of digital technologies for children and adolescents.

She is trained at the University of Virginia as a developmental and quantitative psychologist and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Social and Genetic Psychiatry Center in London. Her program of research focuses on how both early adversity and daily experiences influence children’s health and development.

With over 20 years of experience leading research on adolescent mental health, her team captures the daily lives of adolescents on their smartphones and works with young people, parents, and policy-makers to implement science-based solutions. Odgers has been recognized for her scientific contributions with awards from the Association for Psychological Science, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Jacobs Foundation, Society for Research in Child Development, and the William T. Grant Foundation.

Odgers has written for The Atlantic, taken the mainstage at The Aspen Ideas Festival, and has been featured for her science in the New York Times. She is the author of over 100 scientific publications, has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, and her research has been broadly covered in outlets such as the Economist, London Times, Scientific American, and the Washington Post.

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Sept. 9, 2026

Why social media bans won't work and what we parents can do: Professor Candice Odgers

Ask Rachel anything Are smartphones and social media really damaging our teenagers’ mental health – or are we looking in the wrong place? In this episode, Rachel Richards talks with Professor Candice Odgers, a leading expert on adolescent mental health in the digital age, to unpack what decades of research actually show about teens, tech and wellbeing. We explore why today’s teenagers are doing better than many headlines suggest, the real size of the link between phones, social media, anxiety...