Niobe Way
Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH)
Dr. Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology at New York University. She is the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH), co-founder of agapi and a youth tech center, Principal Investigator (PI) on the Listening with Curiosity Project, and head of the Science of Human Connection Lab. She is also the PI on a 20-year longitudinal study of 1,200 Chinese families. Dr. Way previously served as President of the Society for Research on Adolescence. She earned her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard, and completed an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in the psychology department. She has served on the Aspen Digital group on humanizing AI, consulted for TikTok, and currently serves as a senior fellow for the Carnegie Foundation.
Her mixed-method and longitudinal research examines the social and emotional development of children and adolescents and explores how macro ideologies shape families and child development in the U.S. and China. Dr. Way and her team created the Listening with Curiosity Project (LCP) to address the crisis of connection in schools by teaching the skills of relational intelligence necessary for human connection.
The LCP has been integrated into classrooms across New York City and has been empirically shown to foster social and emotional skills, well-being, and a sense of common humanity. She also developed the NYU core course The Science of Human Connection.
Dr. Way is the author of Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, and the co-editor of The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution (NYU Press). She has authored or co-authored over a hundred journal articles and seven books, including Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press), which inspired Close, a film nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and winner of the Grand Prix Award. Her research with boys and young men has influenced changes to the guidelines for Division 51 of the American Psychological Association. Her forthcoming book, Our Social Nature in an Anti-Social Culture: A Five Part Story (Harvard University Press), continues her exploration of human connection.
Her research has been widely cited in mainstream media, and she has been profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times.