prof.dr. E (Esther) Rozendaal

Biography

Esther Rozendaal is full professor of Digital Resilience and co-lead of the Erasmus Movez Lab, a research team with a shared interest in young people, digital media, and wellbeing. Her research focuses on the empowerment of children and young people as resilient participants in today's digital society. Rozendaal and her team work closely with children and young people, young creators, parents, schools, youth workers and various organisations with a shared interest in the digital resilience of young media users and creators. In this way, they aim to contribute to solutions that enable children and young people to cope with the opportunities and risks of digital media, now and in the future.

In 2020, she was awarded a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for her project 'Empowering children to behave safely online: An integrated developmental-behavioral approach to digital media literacy'. In this 5-year project, Rozendaal and her team investigate how teenagers can be empowered to use digital media in a safe and responsible manner. Using innovative game-technology, they will reveal how media-education can be optimized in order to establish positive and sustainable changes in children’s media-literate behavior.

Rozendaal is also interested in studying children and adolescent’s responses to advertising. For example, she investigates how sponsorship disclosures can help make sponsored social media content (e.g., YouTube videos) more transparent for young audiences.

From Science to Society

Rozendaal is also actively involved in forging links between science and practice. Together with her colleague Moniek Buijzen she established the accessible and appealing online knowledge portal Bitescience.com. Also, she is a member of several advisory boards, for example the Dutch AV rating system (NICAM) and the Dutch Media Literacy Network (Netwerk Mediawijsheid).

Bio

Rozendaal received her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 2011, where she subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher. From 2012 to 2020 she subsequently worked as an assistant and associate professor at the Communication Science department of Radboud University’s Behavioural Science Institute. She received a NWO Vidi grant in 2020 for a 5-year research project studying how teenagers can be empowered to use digital media in a safe and responsible manner. Rozendaal had previously received a NWO Veni grant (2014). Her work has been recognized with awards from the International Communication Association, the International Journal of Advertising, and the Child, and the Netherlands-Flanders Communication Association.