About CLARA Standards

Dr. Ungar is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in Psychology and a seat on the Faculty Advisory Board of MindCORE, Penn's hub for the study of the mind. His expertise includes machine learning, natural-language processing, computational modeling, and the analysis of language and social-media data to understand psychological processes and physical and mental well-being. His background supports CLARA Standards' computational research methods, behavioral measurement, and scientific review of digital-product evaluations.

Dr. Liu is the Director of Research at the Stanford Social Media Lab. Her expertise includes the social and psychological effects of social media and AI, digital well-being, and human–AI interaction. Her research examines how people experience digital technologies and how the design of AI systems and social robots affects users' perceptions and responses. This background supports CLARA Standards' research on digital-product experiences and its development of educational resources for families.

Dr. Upadhyay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at Rutgers Business School. His expertise includes differential privacy, privacy-preserving data analysis, cryptography, and computational methods for analyzing data. Before joining Rutgers, he was a senior researcher in Apple's AI and machine-learning organization. His technical background supports CLARA Standards' assessment of privacy protections in youth-safety systems and the development of research methods that protect users' data.

At Apple, Dr. Upadhyay worked on several critical privacy and safety-related projects, including work to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across encrypted iCloud accounts and report accounts that cross a threshold of such material to authorities, as well as privacy-preserving federated learning to train language models in the federated setting.

Dr. Eichstaedt is a mental health and computational social science expert who develops AI systems to support mental health and well-being and studies the impact of AI on society. He co-directs the $11M Stanford–UCLA CREATE Center for AI therapy and leads the Computational Psychology and Well-Being Lab, evaluating in clinical trials how large language models can safely support therapist training and patients between sessions. In 2011 he co-founded the World Well-Being Project at the University of Pennsylvania, pioneering psychological text-analysis methods that use social media to measure the mental and physical health of populations and individuals. In fall 2026 he joins UCLA Anderson as an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Decision Making, having been an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford and the Shriram Faculty Fellow at its Institute for Human-Centered AI.

Vidur S. Bhatnagar is an award-winning technical product leader, software engineering executive, and two-time startup founder. He founded Keriton, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) breastmilk-management and lactation-analytics platform — raising over $1.5M, winning the digital-health pitch at SXSW, and ultimately being acquired by Natus Medical. At Amazon (2020–2026) he was a Senior Manager of Software Development leading engineering for the Transportation Risk and Compliance division, where he built the CASTR compliance SaaS handling 10,000+ regulatory rules across 17 countries. Earlier, at SAP Labs, he became the company's youngest global Product Owner and was named Employee of the Year. He now serves as a CTO building AI-native B2B commerce technology. His product and engineering leadership informs how CLARA Standards builds its digital tools and safety infrastructure.

Dr. Wisniewski's work lies at the intersection of Social Computing and Privacy. She is an expert in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents. As the Founder and Director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Lab and Teenovate, she has authored over 250 peer-reviewed publications and won multiple best papers (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at ACM SIGCHI conferences. Her research program has secured $6.04 million in external funding, including the NSF CAREER Award, and has been featured in outlets such as Scientific American, CNN, ABC News, NPR, Psychology Today, and U.S. News & World Report. As an ACM Senior Member, Dr. Wisniewski also serves on the DARPA ISAT Study Group and previously served on the Computing Research Association's CCC Council. She became the first computer scientist selected as a William T. Grant Scholar for her efforts to reduce digital inequality for youth. The importance of her work on adolescent online safety has been recognized nationally and internationally by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Netherland's Down to Zero Alliance on combating the online sexual exploitation of children, and the White House's Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety. Together, these efforts have helped shape research, policy, and design practices aimed at creating safer and more equitable digital experiences for young people.

Dr. Molly Ireland is a Social Psychologist at Receptiviti, a company that offers API access to language-based psychological measures such as those in Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). She earned a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pennsylvania. She was a faculty member at Texas Tech University for several years (Visiting Assistant to Associate Professor) before transitioning to industry in fall 2021. Throughout her career in academia and industry, she has used dictionary-based text analysis and other quantitative methods to study how everyday language use — including work conversations, social media messages, journaling, and creative writing — both reflects and influences social behavior, mental health, and individual differences.

Michael is a practitioner and researcher with almost a decade of experience investigating emerging threats, criminal ecosystems, and various forms of online abuse at scale. He currently leads the emerging threats group at eBay, with prior stints disrupting bad actors at Stripe and Amazon Web Services. He is also a nonresident fellow at Menlo Park Intelligence, a research firm studying AI amplification of superintelligent attacks and other cognitive security risks including manipulation, influence operations, and exigent harms.