Dr Ysabel Gerrard

I joined the University of Sheffield as a Lecturer in September 2017, having completed my BA (Hons) degree, MA, and PhD at the University of Leeds’ School of Media and Communication. I was then promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2023. Uniting my research and teaching is a focus on how people - particularly children and young people - navigate their identities through social media platforms. My philosophy within research and pedagogical spaces is to understand the complex relationship between humans and the technologies they use, particularly social media, rather than framing one as having more power over the other.

I engage with various stakeholders as part of my work and am committed to translating knowledge into positive social impacts; for example, I have been a member of Meta’s Suicide and Self-Injury (SSI) Advisory Board since 2019 and have been directly involved in several changes to content policies (for example, banning the advertisement of diet products on Instagram). I also engage in consultancy work for TikTok’s policy team, have spoken at multiple Ofcom events, and was recently seconded to The 5Rights Foundation to produce an online resource for their Risky-by-Design initiative.

I enjoy speaking to the press about my research, and my expertise on topical issues relating to social media has been sought by a wide range of media outlets. Most recently, I have spoken to The Atlantic, BBC News, Business Insider, CNBC, Dazed Digital, Financial Times, HuffPost and Mashable. I am highly committed to sharing academic knowledge with non-academic audiences and have written articles for Glamour Magazine, The Conversation, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED (among other articles for WIRED, see ‘When Algorithms Think You Want To Die’, published in the U.S. and Japan), and Vice.