Michael Milburn is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, where he has taught for over twenty years; he was recognized with the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1998. In 1972 he completed his undergraduate work in psychology at Stanford University, and he then received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University in 1978. In 1993 he was a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Prof. Milburn has published research on a variety of topics over the past 25 years, studying the effects of the mass media and the role emotion plays in individuals' attitudes and behavior. He has worked in the areas of health promotion, politics, and sexuality. In the area of sexuality, he has investigated the roots of sexual harassment and the effects of viewing scenes from R-rated films that sexually objectify women on viewers' perceptions of acquaintance rape. Most recently, he has examined influences upon individuals' sexual attitudes and behavior, and, with Dr. Sheree Conrad, developing and testing the concept of "sexual intelligence."

Prof. Milburn's research on health promotion has examined ways to reduce the onset of teen smoking and the effectiveness of the mass media in reducing the risk of heart disease. In the area of politics, he has studied influences on the development of political ideology, and he has tested the effects of the dramatic presentation of news events on the complexity with which viewers think about the events. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and two previous books, Persuasion and Politics (Brooks-Cole/Wadsworth, 1991) and The Politics of Denial (MIT Press, 1996). With Sheree Conrad, he won the Alfred M. Freedman Award from the International Society of Political Psychology for their research on the politics of denial. In addition to his teaching and research position at UMass/Boston, Prof. Milburn is also a District Trainer for the Unitarian Universalist Association's new comprehensive sexuality curriculum, Our Whole Lives. Prof. Milburn trains sexuality educators to teach the UUA's new sexuality curriculum to 7th-9th graders. He has been married for twenty-five years and has three daughters.