Ovidia Stanoi

Project focus: The Fellow will advance climate communication and action through research and fostering meaningful collaboration between scientists and community members.

Ovidia Stanoi is a Civic Science Fellow with the Climate Communication and Action Division at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. 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 wellbeing 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 Civic Science Fellow at UPenn, she will apply her research to the study of climate communication, action, and resilience in collaboration with Emily Falk, Dani Cosme, and Michael Mann. Before joining UPenn, Ovidia completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at Columbia University in the SCAN Lab with Kevin Ochsner, a M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University in the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab with George Bonanno, and a B.A. in International Relations at Brown University.