Celeste Campos-Castillo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media & Information. Celeste discovers ways technologies can be designed and implemented so that they mitigate inequalities, particularly with respect to health outcomes and access to health care. This interdisciplinary and multimethod research involves documenting where inequalities exist and why, engaging members of minoritized communities to identify their needs, and conducting social psychological research to understand the underlying mechanisms that connect individuals, contexts, and outcomes. Examples of this research include tracking demographic patterns of social media use for health communication, identifying the policy contexts that enable telehealth and patient portals to address health inequities, evaluating how graphic arts design can support the wellbeing of neurodiverse youth, and designing an anti-racist chatbot that identifies when cyberbullying occurs among racially and ethnically diverse adolescents and deploys support.
Celeste’s research has been funded by agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, and Meta and has been published in journals such as Health Affairs, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Journal of the Medical Informatics Association, New Media & Society, Social Psychological Quarterly, Sociological Theory, Social Science Computer Review. She’s been honored to receive awards recognizing her scientific contributions, including a paper award from the International Medical Informatics Association and the Midwest Sociological Society’s Early Career Award, and to accept invitations to share her work with diverse audiences, including local high schools and the National Academies.
Celeste received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Iowa and completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Security, Technology, & Society at Dartmouth College.