Welcoming Dr. Debra Bassett as advisor

We're excited to welcome Dr. Debra Bassett as an advisor to Pantio.

Debra has spent over a decade studying digital afterlives. She did her PhD at the University of Warwick on how people create and inherit digital legacies. She's the author of "You Only Live Twice," one of the main academic books written on this industry. She's published research on everything from grief technologies to the ethics of digital memory.

Digital legacy is becoming part of everyday life. Our lives are embedded in digital environments, and what we leave behind online doesn't just sit there. As Debra puts it, these traces become active sites of memory, identity, and ongoing connection. They can help families preserve stories across generations. But their importance isn't just in preservation. It's in how they're experienced.

And that's where the challenge is. Grief technologies can either bring comfort or cause harm, depending on how they're designed. Debra's research into grief bots and digital afterlives shows that these systems work only when they respect the emotional reality of what people are going through. Grief isn't something to be resolved. It's dynamic, it oscillates, and the technology around it has to account for that.

Debra's role is to keep us honest. We're building something people can turn to for comfort and connection when it matters most. She's spent over ten years studying what happens when that goes wrong and when it goes right.