Scientific Director, Youth Safety & Wellbeing

About this role

Note: APA operates on a 37.5-hour work week with one-hour lunch breaks each day. APA sets salaries based on several considerations, including years of relevant experience, level of education, and previous staff and/or governance experience at APA.
The Center for Behavioral Science and AI (CBSAI) is a new APA entity built to shape how AI systems affect the people who use them, starting with its first priority area, Youth Safety & Wellbeing. The Scientific Director is the person who carries scientific authority for this priority area, chairs and manages the Youth Safety & Wellbeing Scientific Advisory Group, and ensures the Center's Specifications and Public Guidance workstreams are grounded in rigorous, defensible science.
The Scientific Director must have demonstrated experience guiding and organizing groups composed of senior academic and clinical experts and engaging them in substantive scientific discussion. The Director must also be able to provide independent scientific leadership in conversations with AI industry partners, funders, and other stakeholders. The role requires deep subject-matter expertise, an appreciation for the breadth of psychological science relevant to youth safety and well-being, and the judgment to make sound, timely decisions in a rapidly changing technological environment whose implications for young people continue to evolve.
About the Center
Technology companies have long recognized the importance of understanding how human behavior intersects with AI systems, platforms, and applications. With AI rapidly penetrating all aspects of individuals' lives and society as a whole, the technology presents both extraordinary promise and significant risks.
The CBSAI seeks to fundamentally broaden the role of psychological science in AI's layered ecosystem — spanning software, hardware, language models, data tools, and the interfaces used to build, train, deploy, and manage AI applications. The Center is how APA's institutional capacity becomes operational for the AI industry: a permanent infrastructure for translating the broad body of behavioral science into the products that now mediate how billions of people think, feel, learn, work, and relate to one another.
APA believes AI's scaffolding should enable humans to thrive, adapt, and grow across all dimensions of life. The Center will sit at the nexus of human behavior, technology, and well-being — bridging academic research and real-world impact by bringing sound science to AI and technology companies through research, advocacy, education, and national and international collaboration.
The Center is in its start-up phase and is building its founding team, beginning with the scientific leadership for its first priority area, Youth Safety & Wellbeing.
Education and Experience Required:

• Ph.D. in a relevant field (e.g., developmental or clinical psychology, public health, human-computer interaction, cognitive/behavioral science, or a related discipline), with an active or recent research record in youth development, media/technology effects, or a closely related area.

• Working knowledge of, and demonstrated engagement with, AI systems — sufficient to inform the translation of scientific findings into technical specifications and to engage credibly with engineering and product teams.

• Established, recognized standing in the youth safety/wellbeing research field, evidenced by publications, leadership roles, and/or peer recognition at a level that supports serving as a facilitator to senior Scientific Advisory members.

• Prior experience chairing, serving on, or otherwise running a scientific advisory board, review panel, or similarly convened expert body preferred.

• Scientific rigor paired with pragmatism: able to set a defensible evidentiary bar and act on it without requiring full field consensus.

• Strong ability to build relationships: can represent CBSAI credibly with senior academics, AI-company leadership, funders, and policymakers alike.

• Demonstrated moral and scientific integrity: a track record of holding independent positions under commercial or institutional pressure.

• Serves as a connector: Strong network across academic, clinical, industry, and policy communities working on youth safety and technology — knows who is doing credible work and who else to bring in.

• Comfortable operating at start-up speed in a newly formed, pilot-phase organization with evolving processes and limited infrastructure.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to translate scientific nuance for engineering, policy, and public audiences.

Responsibilities:
Scientific Leadership & Advisory Management

• Chair and manage the Youth Safety & Wellbeing Scientific Advisory: set agendas, recruit and steward members, and run the body as a genuine peer-level scientific forum rather than an advisory formality.

• Serve as CBSAI's credible scientific face for this priority area — recognized by, and able to recruit from, the researchers the field already looks to.

• Maintain a broad, current personal network across academia, clinical practice, and industry research on youth development, media, and technology — know who is doing rigorous work and who else to call.

Specifications Workstream (Owner)

• Own the Specifications workstream for Youth Safety & Wellbeing: translating behavioral science into useable specifications for engineering and product teams.

• Translate scientific evidence into specific, engineer-ready product and design requirements, in partnership with Center staff.

• Set the scientific bar for when available evidence supports action, balancing rigor with the need to respond to emerging challenges in a rapidly evolving field. Comfortable making evidence-informed recommendations without waiting for definitive academic consensus, while maintaining a transparent and defensible scientific rationale.

Public Guidance Workstream (Scientific Review)

• Serve as scientific reviewer…