About

Maria Moreno, Ph.D. in Anthropology, is a member of the DPLA teaching faculty at UW-Madison who focuses on community-engaged learning, outreach, and scholarship both locally and internationally. Trained as an anthropologist, she concentrates on the relationships between human culture, the environment, and holistic wellbeing. Dr. Moreno engages young people, teachers, and community members in land-based learning informed by notions of resilience, stewardship, and ethics. During her time at UW-Madison, she has served as Associate for Experiential Education for the undergraduate Global Health program and has long-standing engagement with Indigenous communities in Wisconsin as a Faculty Associate for DPLA with Earth Partnership. She designs and teaches undergraduate courses and develops curricula for outreach programs centered on restoration education. Additionally, Dr. Moreno served on the Lakes and Watershed Commission from 2018-2024, demonstrating her commitment to community service and environmental stewardship. She leads Earth Partnership Programs in México, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Puerto Rico. Her academic background includes a doctorate from UW-Madison, a master's degree from Boston University, and an undergraduate degree from American University. Her service in the Peace Corps in Mauritania and Mali, West Africa, has provided her with valuable insights that inform her work.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Internet privacy
• World Wide Web
• Social psychology
• Nursing
• Psychotherapist
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Public relations
• Clinical psychology
• Psychiatry
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Health Benefits of Social Media Use in Adolescents and Young Adults

  Current Pediatrics Reports · 2025-08-15 · 14 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Purpose of Review: Although attention has increased on the negative aspects of social media use in adolescents and young adults, social media can have health benefits. This review explores positive health aspects of social media and delivers guidance to clinicians on how to balance attention to the negatives and positives of social media use. Recent Findings: Recent findings show social media can play an important role in social connection and identity development in adolescents and young adults. The platforms are also important for mental health support and accessing health information. Summary: Clinicians should have open-ended conversations with adolescents and young adults to understand their social media use patterns. They can use the American Academy of Pediatrics 5 Cs of media use and the family media plan to guide conversations on social media use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adolescent Perspectives on Patterns of Tiktok Use: A Focus Group Study

  Journal of Adolescent Health · 2025-02-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  About 63% of adolescents report use of TikTok. This platform’s focus on short videos could be associated with unique usage patterns and mental health outcomes. This study explored adolescent perspectives on patterns of TikTok use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adolescent Experiences With Navigating Health Information on Social Media and Beyond: Using Qualitative Data to Inform a Model

  Journal of Adolescent Health · 2025-04-24 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Directly Observing and Characterizing Adolescents' Self-generated Social Media Posts: Creation and Implementation of a Cyberethnography Informed Codebook (Preprint)

  2025-09-19

  preprintOpen access

  <sec> <title>UNSTRUCTURED</title> Background: Adolescent social media research has primarily focused on frequency of platform use and self-report measures. There has been limited focus on the self-generated content posted by adolescents and how this might relate to their wellbeing. Objective: This manuscript describes a researcher-observed codebook for characterizing adolescents’ self-generated content in a longitudinal sample. Methods: Participants in the study provided informed assent (and parental informed consent) for researchers to follow them and passively observe their self-generated content on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X (formerly known as Twitter). Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological biopsychosocial model, the research team created a codebook incorporating prior cyberethnographic observation of self-generated social media content. After codebook refinement, coders (research staff and student research assistants) were trained through multiple rounds of test coding, and the codebook was applied to participant data with periodic quality control measures to ensure interrater reliability. Results: The study sample includes 344 participants (mean age = 13.89 years) with a total of 4,886 participant-months coded by 28 coders between April 2023 and June 2025. Interrater reliability agreement scores (AC1) have shown strong interrater reliability; For Year 1, scores were Facebook 0.89, Instagram 0.89, TikTok 0.88, X 0.87, and combined 0.88; for Year 2: Facebook 0.95, Instagram 0.96, TikTok 0.96, X 0.96, and combined 0.96. Conclusions: This project provides replicable guidance to categorize social media data from adolescent participants using human coders who can contextualize content through longitudinal observation. The method that our team chose and followed paved the way for many strengths to be recognized as well as lessons learned by our team that allowed for adaptation and growth to occur. This granted the team the opportunity to recognize the importance of the chosen methodology, which ultimately led to the conclusion of showing the relationship social media and socio-emotional wellbeing along with the need for further research to be explored on this topic. </sec>

  PublisherDOI

• Is It Really “The Only Video You'll Need”? Assessing the Quality of Menstrual Pain Treatment Information on Tiktok

  Journal of Adolescent Health · 2025-02-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adolescent Emoji Use in Text-Based Messaging: Focus Group Study

  JMIR Formative Research · 2025-04-28 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Background: Adolescents increasingly communicate through text-based messaging platforms such as SMS and social media messaging. These are now the dominant platforms for communication between adolescents, and adolescents use them to obtain emotional support from parents and other adults. The absence of nonverbal cues can make it challenging to communicate emotions on these platforms, however, so users rely on emojis to communicate sentiment or imbue messages with emotional tone. While research has investigated the functions of emojis in adult communication, less is known about adolescent emoji use. Objective: This study sought to understand whether the pragmatic functions of adolescent emoji use resemble those of adults, and to gain insight into the semantic meanings of emojis sent by adolescents. Methods: Web-based focus groups were conducted with a convenience sample of adolescents, in which participants responded to questions about their use and interpretation of emojis and engaged in unstructured interactions with one another. Two trained coders analyzed transcripts using a constant comparative coding procedure to identify themes in the discussion. Results: A total of 6 focus groups were conducted with 31 adolescent participants (mean age 16.2, SD 1.5 years). Discussion in the groups generally fell into 4 themes: emojis as humorous or absurd, emokis as insincere or complex expressions of setiment, emojis as straightforward experssions of sentiment, and emojis as having context-dependent meanings. Across themes, participants often described important differences between their own emoji use and emoji use by adults. Conclusions: Adolescent focus group participants described patterns of emoji use that largely resembled those observed in studies of adults. Like adults, our adolescent participants described emojis' semantic meanings as being highly flexible and context-dependent. They also described both phatic and emotive functions of emoji use but described both functions in ways that differed from the patterns of emoji use described in adult samples. Adolescents described their phatic emoji use as absurd and described their emotive emoji use as most often sarcastic. These findings suggest that emoji use serves similar pragmatic functions for both adolescents and adults, but that adolescents see their emoji use as more complex than adult emoji use. This has important implications for adults who communicate with adolescents through text-based messaging and for researchers interested in adolescents' text-based communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Pairing a Validated Alcohol Intervention With Social Media Alcohol Risk Identification: Impact on Alcohol Behaviors and Social Media Posts

  Journal of Adolescent Health · 2025-06-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 154. The Relationship Between Neural Mechanisms Associated With Self- Versus Peer-Generated Social Media Posts and Health and Risk Attitudes and Behaviors

  Journal of Adolescent Health · 2025-02-07

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Navigating the complexities of adolescent health and social media

  The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health · 2025-04-08 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Adolescent Health and Generative AI—Risks and Benefits

  JAMA Pediatrics · 2025-11-10 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  This Viewpoint explores how generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools may affect adolescent health and well-being in the following domains: health information, cognition, critical thinking, mental health, body image, social connection, physical activity, and sleep.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bradley Kerr

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  45 shared

• Jens C. Eickhoff

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  42 shared

• Dimitri Christakis

  University of Washington

  36 shared

• Rachel A. Katzenellenbogen

  36 shared

• Jennifer M. Whitehill

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  33 shared

• Henry N. Young

  University of Georgia

  29 shared

• Elizabeth Cox

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  28 shared

• Ellen Selkie

  23 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Landscape Architecture

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  2005

• M.S., Landscape Architecture

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  2002

• B.S., Landscape Architecture

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1999