Anneke Meyerberg-Buffone

Dr. Anneke Buffone is a social scientist and user researcher currently developing novel approaches to youth safety testing and age assurance for large language models and chatbots. Previously, she spent nearly seven years at Meta working on both product engagement and safety, including research on age gating and excessive use. At Meta, she was known for product intuition, creative intervention design, and translating behavioral research into systems engineers could actually build—bridging the gap between social science insights. Her current focus is identifying, through research, the nuanced reasons that well-intentioned safety measures and regulations fail.

Prior to Meta, she was Lead Research Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania's World Well-Being Project (Templeton Foundation), working with computer scientist Lyle Ungar and positive psychology founder Martin Seligman. She co-developed computational methods for measuring wellbeing, stress, and empathy from language data at population scale, and created the first public empathy lexicon. Her work has been cited over 1,100 times. She earned her PhD in Social Psychology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Her commitment to youth safety is personal as well as professional. She is a trained suicide and crisis counselor and spent over 10 years in youth leadership development and cultural sensitivity training—with international exchange organizations Youth For Understanding and AIESEC.

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