Lindsay Young is an assistant professor of health communication and communication networks at USC Annenberg. Her research employs social-network and critical perspectives to identify, characterize, and interrogate the social contexts that contribute to and/or facilitate health disparities, access to critical health resources, and health behavior change in marginalized, resource-restricted communities. She has a particular interest in the contextual factors that affect HIV-prevention engagement among young sexual-minority men of color. To these ends, she applies a rich computational toolkit that includes stochastic network modeling, semantic network mapping, computational text analysis and predictive modeling.

Young’s work is also driven by a praxis orientation, governed by a desire to help affected communities leverage the power of their organic networks toward improved community health. To these ends, she draws on community-oriented, asset-based models of community development and social network theories of health behavior change to design community health interventions that privilege intrinsic structures and assets.

Currently, her work is supported by an NIH Career Development Pathway to Independence Award, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Her work has been published in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals across multiple research domains such as Social Science and Medicine, AIDS and Behavior, Clinical Trials, Preventive Medicine Reports, Social Networks, and Network Science.

Prior to joining USC, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination at the University of Chicago. She earned her PhD in media, technology and society (MTS) from the School of Communication at Northwestern University, her MS in science communication from Drexel University, and her BA in public communication from American University.

Awards and honors:

NIH Pathway to Independence Award, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (2018-2023)
Health Disparities Research Institute (HDRI) Fellow, National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (2020)
Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences (SICSS) Fellow, Duke University (2020)
NIH Summer Institute for Randomized Behavioral Clinical Trials Fellow, NIH Office of Behavioral Social Science Research (2019)
Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS) Visiting Summer Fellow, University of Southern California (2018)