Emily Rothman

Dr. Emily F. Rothman is professor and chair of the Boston University Occupational Therapy Department, with a secondary appointment at the Boston University School of Public Health where she has been a faculty member since 2004. Dr. Rothman is a social epidemiologist. She studies sexual and dating violence prevention, and she also studies autism. She has been the principal investigator on research studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), US Department of Defense (DoD), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), Patient Centered Outcomes Institute (PCORI), Organization for Autism Research (OAR), and others. Her TED talk “How porn changes the way teens think about sex” has garnered more than 3.2 million views, and her research on pornography was a focus of a 2018 article in The New York Times Magazine. She is an appointed member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Council on Sexual and Domestic Violence, and served on the Massachusetts Task Force on Sexual Assault Climate Surveys. She is the author of the book “Pornography and Public Health” (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is frequently consulted by media. She has appeared on the “Today” show on NBC, and her research has been featured on NPR and by The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Teen Vogue, and othe media outlets.