Scientific Director, Youth Safety & Wellbeing

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 and sign-off authority for Public Guidance deliverables (practitioner guides, public education materials, policy recommendations) prior to release, ensuring accuracy and rigor.
• Partner with Center staff on cross-workstream questions where a Topic produces deliverables in both workstreams.

Independence & Scientific Integrity

• Hold the line on scientific conclusions and methodology against commercial, reputational, and/or funder pressure, consistent with CBSAI's firewall commitments (AI-company partners may weigh in on relevance and factual accuracy — never on findings or conclusions).
• Flag independence or firewall concerns to the Executive Director

External Representation & Field Engagement

• Represent CBSAI's science externally at major convenings, funder and industry conversations, and public forums (e.g., high-profile global and industry gatherings).
• Build and sustain the relationships that keep CBSAI credible with the scientific field, AI companies, and funders simultaneously.

Team Building & Supervision

• Directly supervise the Product Lead and help define how the Specifications workstream team grows.
• Serve as the working model for how future priority-area Scientific Leads are hired and structured as CBSAI adds priority areas.

Travel

• Some domestic and international travel to represent CBSAI at major scientific, policy, and industry convenings, Scientific Advisory meetings, and academic conferences.

Other Duties as Assigned

About APA:

The American Psychological Association (APA) represents 146,000 psychologists, students, and affiliates, primarily in the U.S. and Canada but also in other countries around the world. APA is a scientific and professional organization with about 500 employees and is categorized as a 501(c)(3) along with its 501(c)(6) companion organization, APA Services, Inc.

APA offers a generous employee benefits program, including Remote Work/Flexible Scheduling; a 401(k) option with employer match of up to 4%; medical, dental, and vision insurance options and an outpatient mental health benefit; paid personal/vacation time plus 12 paid holidays; Family/Medical Leave; tuition assistance; an Employee Assistance Program (EAP); short- and long-term disability insurance; and more.

Job Location: Remote: APA jobs may be considered for remote work eligibility as defined in APA’s Flexible Work Policy and are subject to approval. Remote work employees may not work from the following states or U.S. territories: Alaska, California, Colorado, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, Washington, Wyoming.

Application Instructions:

Qualified candidates must apply online through APA’s applicant system and attach a resume and cover letter specifying your salary expectations. Applications that are submitted without both documents are considered incomplete and will not be reviewed for consideration. Once your application is submitted, you will receive a confirmation email. Please make sure to check your Spam folder if you do not receive an email from us.

The American Psychological Association is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, personal appearance, familial status, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law. #LIremote