The $400,000 award will allow the informatics professor to continue her work on “Inclusive and Evidence-Based Technologies for Child and Youth Development.”


Kleist Professor of Informatics Gillian Hayes has received one of only three Advanced Research Fellowships awarded by The Jacobs Foundation, the charitable organization that mounts global intervention work and research on child and youth development.

The three-year fellowship targets the most innovative mid-career researchers working on youth and child development, funding internationally relevant research projects with nearly $400,000 and engaging fellows in an unique interdisciplinary network of Jacobs Foundation scholars.

Building on her own research on technologies for underserved families, Hayes’ fellowship project will develop a framework for designing technologies for and with youth, as well as establish a structure for measuring the outcomes of these technological designs. The project, “Inclusive and Evidence-Based Technologies for Child and Youth Development,” seeks to understand how to involve children, young adults and their caregivers to create, co-create and re-create technologies that are evidence-based, empowering and supportive of child and youth development. Hayes intends to conduct this work in a range of settings by cooperating with other foundations.

“I am excited to work with the Jacobs Foundation because they are doing amazing global intervention work and research on child and youth development,” Hayes says. “The foundation has recently started an emphasis on ‘eKids,’ recognizing that children are increasingly consumers and producers of a wide variety of media and are exposed on a regular basis to vast and varied technologies. Understanding child development requires understanding technology’s relationship to children, and vice versa.”

Established in 1989, The Jacobs Foundation is a leading global charitable foundation dedicated to facilitating innovations for children and youth by interlinking word-class child development research with practical intervention programs worldwide.

“I see this as an opportunity to work with some of the world’s best researchers in child development to create, evaluate and understanding technologies,” Hayes says.