Deborah L. Linebarger, Ph.D.

Director, Children's Media Lab

Assistant Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

dlinebarger@asc.upenn.edu | View Penn Bio Page

Dr. Deborah L. Linebarger (Ph.D., 1998, University of Texas, Austin) is Assistant Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Linebarger is the director and principal investigator of the Children's Media Lab. Her research focuses on the relationships among children's developmental status, their use of media, and their larger social worlds. Her research combines descriptive work evaluating relationships between children's media use and their cognitive and social development; micro-level experimental work to detect the features used in media that elicit attention and contribute to comprehension of content; and macro-level program evaluation and intervention work that combines the knowledge gained through both descriptive and basic research and applies it in various real-world contexts. Her research has been presented at numerous conferences and published in psychology, communication, education, and pediatric medicine books and journals.