Join us for the Climate Week installment in our Fall Seminar Series featuring Emily Falk, Vice Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication. Each month, the series spotlights Penn experts at the forefront of climate science, policy, and action, sharing work and research that’s shaping how we understand and respond to a changing world.
Summary: Climate solutions require sustained engagement across individual behavior, media ecosystems, and policy. However, disengagement is a common response to chronic complexity and threat. This talk will highlight research at the intersection of communication, psychology, and neuroscience about how to motivate individual and collective climate action.
Bio: Emily Falk is a professor of communication, psychology, and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and the vice dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, where she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Author of the book What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change, Falk is an expert in the science of behavior change. Her award-winning research uses tools from psychology, neuroscience, and communication to examine what makes messages persuasive, why and how ideas spread, and what makes people effective communicators. She and her team leverage insights into how people coordinate, bond, and influence one another to design interventions that increase health and wellbeing, climate action and resilience, and equity.