BYRON B. REEVES, a noted expert on the effects of media, was appointed professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford in 1985 after spending the first 10 years of his academic career in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Professor Reeves has published widely on such topics as children and television, physiological responses to media, attention, memory, and emotion, the history of media effects research, political advertising, television news, and multi-player interactive games. He is co-author of The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and the New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge University Press).
Professor Reeves is currently Director of the Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), an interdisciplinary group of faculty working at the intersection of computing and social sciences. He is also co-founder of the Media X Program that brings together industry partners with university researchers across the campus working on innovations in interactive technology.
Together with graduate students in the Department of Communication, Professor Reeves is currently studying psychological responses to interactive media. Current projects in his lab include the study of emotional responses to interactive robots, physiological arousal to media and influences on learning, responses to conversational agents in automated telephone and web transactions, and psychological responses in multi-player games.
Professor Reeves teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and has been head of graduate studies at Wisconsin and in the Institute for Communication Research at Stanford. Professor Reeves has worked with numerous graduate students and was the major professor for 28 students who are currently faculty members at major universities.
Professor Reeves is also concerned with the application of communication research to the media industry and to governmental policy. He has been a consultant to the television networks, the Public Broadcasting Service, and other media groups, and he has testified about media issues to the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress. Currently, Professor Reeves works with several companies developing new media products, including Microsoft Research, Nokia, IBM, Cisco, OMRON, and the Sesame Workshop.
Professor Reeves studied graphic design, music, and journalism at Southern Methodist University, receiving his B.F.A. in 1972, and communication and social sciences at Michigan State University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1976. He was elected a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2000.