David Barnstone

David is a second year PhD student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University studying the dynamics of media use in families with young children. He is particularly interested in how parents and other caregivers come to form beliefs about media effects on children and how those beliefs influence the structure of a child's environment and, ultimately, their development and behavior. He is broadly interested in how scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, consumed, and acted on. David received his B.A. with an individual concentration in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and Science Journalism in 2014 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was a research assistant in Daniel Anderson’s Children and Media Lab. Since graduating from UMass, he has worked as a communications specialist and science writer for several scientific organizations, including the American Physical Society, the Society for Neuroscience, and Springer Nature. Prior to Stanford, David served as a research coordinator in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a research assistant at the Georgetown University Early Learning Project in Washington, DC.