Ovidia Stanoi, Ph.D.

Ovidia examines 1) how people regulate their emotions, perceptions, and behaviors to build social connections and to achieve their social goals and 2) how social relationships shape wellbeing in turn.

Ovidia Stanoi is the Mary Frances Berry Postdoctoral Researcher and Civic Science Fellow in the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, working with the Annenberg School for Communication's Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM). Her research is twofold. First, she studies how people regulate their emotions, perceptions, and behaviors to build social connections and to achieve their social goals. Second, she examines the neural, behavioral, and network mechanisms through which social relationships impact well-being and health. Across all her studies, she capitalizes on the heterogeneity typical of psychology samples to understand when and for whom certain relationships emerge. In her work, Ovidia uses both laboratory and in-the-wild studies that leverage recently developed techniques in functional MRI, experience-sampling, multilevel modeling, and social network methods.

As a postdoctoral researcher at Penn, she will apply her research to the study of climate communication, action, and resilience in collaboration with Drs. Emily Falk and Dani Cosme in the Communication Neuroscience Lab and Dr. Michael Mann in PCSSM. Before joining Penn, Ovidia completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at Columbia University in the SCAN Lab with Dr. Kevin Ochsner, a M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab with Dr. George Bonanno, and a B.A. in International Relations at Brown University.