Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

In May 2022, she published the book Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad) with HarperWave, a division of HarperCollins. Central to the book is a critique of the medical model of mental illness, focusing on anxiety as a prime case in point, arguing that a disease approach to anxiety fails to distinguish between normal and pathological forms of emotional suffering, and inadvertently contributes to societal increases in mental health problems.

Since 2020, Dennis-Tiwary has served as a research advisor for the Global Day of Unplugging and the Hunter College Food Policy Center, as well as a media consultant for ABC News and NBC/Universal from 2017 to 2021. She served as a consultant to the NYC Public School System from 2017 to 2019 and the New York Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2020.

In 2019, she co-founded and serves as chief science officer for the digital therapeutics company Wise Therapeutics, where the mission is to develop clinically validated cognitive treatment approaches embedded in highly accessible mobile games to improve mental health, with a focus on anxiety- and stress-related disorders, addiction, major depressive disorder, and combinations with brain stimulation. Her work in digital therapeutics, including her role as co-founder of Wise Therapeutics, was the front cover story of the November 2021 issue of StartUp Health Magazine.

Dennis-Tiwary has examined the impact of social media on emotional functioning, including the development of a validated questionnaire, the Social Media and Communication Questionnaire (SMCQ). In other research, Dennis-Tiwary and colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University developed a novel modification of the classic Still Face paradigm to model and examine the impact of parental withdrawal via mobile devices. Findings suggested that consistent parental withdrawal during mobile device use could have a negative social-emotional impact on developing children and the parent-child relationship. This study was recreated in 2019 for a network TV special report for ABC entitled, "ScreenTime: Diane Sawyer Reporting."

Dennis-Tiwary has served on the editorial boards of Affective Neuroscience since 2019 and the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology since 2017. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) as well as a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

Dennis-Tiwary’s work has been featured in numerous publications, popular press articles, podcasts, documentaries, and television specials including: CBS News, The Guardian, the Telegraph, NBC New York, Scientific American, the Washington Post, Fast Company, Vox, NPR, and How-To Academy. She has been interviewed widely as an expert on anxiety, technology, digital therapeutics, and youth development, including on NPR-Morning Edition, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, KCRW Life Examined, and KERA Think. She has also authored several prominent opinion pieces, including the New York Times Opinion essay entitled, “Taking Away the Phones Won’t Solve Our Teenagers’ Problems,” and the Saturday Essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “In Praise of Anxiety.” Since 2017, Dennis-Tiwary has written the column “More Than a Feeling” for Psychology Today. Her work was the subject of the 2013 documentary Changing Minds at Concord High and she appeared in the 2021 documentary I Am Gen Z.

Since 2004, Dennis-Tiwary has worked as a professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she also serves as the co-executive director of the Center for Health Technology, and as a member of the graduate faculty in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience as well as health psychology and clinical science at The Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Dennis-Tiwary was born on January 11 in Sayre, Pennsylvania. After being admitted to the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester as a performance major (oboe), she shifted her focus of study to graduate summa cum laude with her B.A. in psychology from the University of Rochester in 1995, where she studied approach and avoidance motivation with Andrew Elliot and child maltreatment with Dante Cicchetti at the Mt. Hope Family Center. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at The Pennsylvania State University in 2001, where she specialized in the study of emotion regulation, parent-child interactions, and the cross-cultural context of emotional development and adjustment. From 2002 to 2004 she completed her postdoctoral training in intervention science at the Institute for Risk at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (born January 11, 1973) is an American clinical psychologist, author, health technology entrepreneur, and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Her research explores emotion regulation and its role in mental health and illness, with a particular focus on anxiety and anxiety-related attention biases, as well as child emotional development. She is known for her nuanced view of the impact of digital technology and social media on psychological well-being in youth and adults, including adjustment, relationship quality, anxiety, and emotion regulation.