Caitlyn Vergara is an advocate for public safety and youth mental health with three years of Trust & Safety research experience across industry, nonprofit, and academia. A graduate of UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, she completed a capstone project with Google[x] on public perception of predictive policing models and later led participatory research to build data privacy policies for marginalized populations.
Caitlyn's work at Stanford Psychiatry and SimPPL focused on developing digital wellness resources for youths and frameworks for online safety, sparking her interest in evidence-based interventions for youth with severe mental illness. As an aspiring policymaker, her goal is to bridge the fields of mental health and Trust & Safety to develop standardized practices for content moderators, the “social workers” of the internet, to create a healthier virtual community.
Now a Research Assistant at Harvard Medical School’s Mental Health for All Lab, she supports the EMPOWER youth pilot, a digital program scaling the mental health workforce. Caitlyn is committed to fostering a healthier world for the next generation. In her spare time, she mentors students globally in digital wellness research and policy.