Candice Odgers cited as one of Orange County’s most influential people
Candice Odgers’ influence is well known across UC Irvine, where the professor of psychological science and informatics researches how early, daily and online experiences influence children’s health and development. She is also known as the School of Social Ecology’s director of research and faculty development.
However, Odgers’ influence extends across the entire region, according to the Orange County Business Journal’s OC500 2024, an annual compilation of the 500 most influential people in Orange County, California.
Known as “what business people read,” the weekly print and digital publication singled out Odgers for embarking on a study in 2023 to determine the potential for artificial intelligence to improve learning among school children around the world. “In terms of AI, there is a lot of great work that’s happening,” Odgers tells the OCBJ, “but it’s being done on fairly small populations. No one’s yet created a true national benchmark.”
Along with UC Irvine Vice Provost for Graduate Education Gillian Hayes, Odgers co-directs the Connecting the EdTech Research EcoSystem (CERES). The Jacobs Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit whose mission is to help children reach their potential worldwide, donated $11 million in 2021 so the talented scholars could create CERES.
Odgers is also the co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Child and Brain Development Program, which examines the effect of the early environment on the lifelong trajectory going from childhood to old age of physical, mental and social health and wellbeing.
Her own research site at UCI is the Adaptation, Development and Positive Transitions Lab (Adaptlab), which works with collaborators all over the world. The Adaptlab team focuses on mapping trajectories of children and adolescents’ development in daily life and across the life course using a broad range of methods ranging from deploying wearable sensors to merging large-scale administrative records.
Odgers’ research has been disseminated widely via such outlets as The Economist, The New York Times, Scientific American and the Washington Post, and she is the author of more than 100 scientific publications.
She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, before earning a doctorate in psychology from the University of Virginia. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre in London, she joined the UCI faculty in 2007 as an assistant professor.
Professor Odgers’ influence extends beyond UCI and Orange County, to across North America and the world. This is due not only to the reach of her multiple research sites and positions but her countless prestigious accolades, which include being named a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate in 2023 and an invited member to a scientific advisory board of the United Kingdom Medical Research Council and the National Scientific Council in 2022 and 2019, respectively.
— Matt Coker