Bradley Turnwald, PhD
About
Welcome to my website! Here you’ll find information about my research on motivation, health, and climate-friendly behavior from the past decade.
I’m a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Instagram where I apply behavioral science insights to improve and understand the user experience. Prior to that, I was a Behavioral Scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Center for Decision Research, Behavioral Scientist at the Food for Climate League, and Postdoctoral Scientist at Stanford University in Social Psychology.
I use creative qualitative and experimental methods to improve health and wellbeing, such as analyzing how popular movie characters and Instagram celebrities talk about healthy foods, re-labeling vegetables to emphasize flavor and enjoyment in real-world field experiments, and creating an experimental genetic testing service to measure the consequences of receiving health risk information.
My research has won prestigious awards such as the 2020 NIH Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Award and the 2020 Social Personality Health Network Outstanding Research Award. Take a look at my research and publications pages to learn more.
My findings are published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, Psychological Science, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Health Psychology, and featured in popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR. You can access my data sets, preregistrations, toolkits, and other resources on my Resources page.
I earned my PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 2019, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Regina Casper Stanford Graduate Fellow. Prior to that, I earned my MS in Biology from Stanford University in 2015 and my BA in Zoology from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013, where I was a Goldwater Scholar.

Contact
Bradley P. Turnwald
email: turnwaldbrad/at/gmail/dot/com