Matt Motta, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Law, Policy, & Management at Boston University’s School of Public Health. He is working with the Center for Health Communication to define best practice for promoting effective public health communication on social media platforms, including evaluating the impact of its Creators Summit on Mental Health program.
Previously, Matt was Assistant Professor of Political Science (American Politics, Research Methods) at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. Before that, he was a Science of Science Communication postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (University of Pennsylvania). He was also based at the Yale Law School, where he was an affiliated postdoctoral scholar at the Cultural Cognition Project.
Matt received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, where he was also a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow and Doctoral Dissertation Fellow.
Matt’s research focuses on a wide range of topics related to American politics, public opinion, science communication, and both health and environmental policy. He is especially interested in identifying the social and political determinants of anti-science attitudes, and investigating their policy impact. He is also broadly interested in designing communication strategies that promote effective engagement between the public and the scientific community on politically contentious issues. Matt also conducts survey research as a Research Fellow at the Policy Lab at Brown University, and is funded by the National Science Foundation to develop new methods for effective vaccine communication.
