Center on nanotechnology & society fellows

M. Ellen Mitchell, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow

M. Ellen Mitchell is the Senior Fellow of the Center on Nanotechnology and Society, as well as the Director of the Institute of Psychology, Deputy Director of the Institute for Science Law and Technology (ISLAT), and a Fellow of the Institute for Biotechnology and the Human Future at Illinois Institute of Technology.She completed her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Tennessee and her internship training at Yale School of Medicine. She worked in community mental health settings at practice and administrative levels before joining the faculty in 1987. She was the 1990-91 Recipient of Lewis College Junior Faculty Teaching Award and a former Consulting Editor to the APA journal, Psychological Assessment. She is on the Executive Board of the Council of Graduate Programs of Psychology, a national psychology organization. Her research, presentations, and publications focus on supportive interpersonal relationships as a moderator of health and mental health outcomes including utilization of mental health services, moderators of depression among people coping with divorce, recovery from crime victimization, the relationship between social skills and social support, and predictor models of estrangement. In 2002, in partnership with Lori Andrews, she organized an interdisciplinary conference on The Humanity of Technology that brought together a diverse group of individuals to address myriad human issues associated with emerging technologies. More recently she has begun to write about human issues in nanotechnology. She has been the Director of the Institute of Psychology at IIT since 1996 and was named Deputy Director of ISLAT in June of 2000.