Dr. Ebony McGee

Ebony Omotola McGee, Ph.D., is a professor of Diversity and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. She investigates what it means to be racially marginalized and minoritized in the context of learning and achieving in STEM higher education and the STEM professions. She studies the racialized structures and institutional barriers that adversely affect the education and career trajectories of underrepresented groups of color, focusing particularly on STEM entrepreneurship. Her scholarship involves exploring the social, material, and health costs of academic achievement and problematizing traditional forms of success in higher education, with an unapologetic focus on Black folx within the STEM ecosystem. She received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant to investigate the role of marginalization in undercutting success in STEM through psychological stress, interrupted STEM career trajectories, impostor phenomenon, and other debilitating race-related trauma for Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx doctoral students.

McGee’s first career was in electrical engineering, where she was a competitive intelligence analyst but yearned to create a legacy that intersected racial justice with STEM. In her second career, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics education from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago, and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University. With funding from eleven NSF grants, she cofounded and directs the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative or EDEFI (pronounced “edify”). She also co-founded the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies Training for Underrepresented Scholars (ICQCM), which develops quantitative and mixed-methods skillsets that challenge simplistic quantifications of race and marginalization. ICQCM is funded by the NSF, the Spencer Foundation, and the W. T. Grant Foundation.

Her latest research explores the relationship between STEM innovation and entrepreneurship. In 2016, she served on the “Status and Overview of HBCU STEM/R&D Performance and Trends in Investments in STEM, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” panel as part of the White House Initiative on HBCUs. Her work focuses on the infrastructure enhancements required to support a diverse population of founders and business owners in STEM. She is a member of the research team for the National GEM Consortium’s Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4), which is a $3.5 million cooperative partnership between the NSF and the National GEM Consortium to develop a national diversity and inclusion infrastructure for the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Program. NSF I-Corps supports academic researchers in launching tech startups through entrepreneurial training, particularly translating research discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace.

A key concept in her work is the equity ethic. In articles in the Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Engineering Education, and American Journal of Education, she has demonstrated that people of color in STEM gravitate toward empathic social causes, such as the elimination of disparities and racial justice efforts within and beyond their STEM pursuits. Their racial and ethnic marginalization—and the way they themselves have suffered—translates into concerns about local and global disparities.

Her first sole-authored book is Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation, in which she conducted 319 interviews with high-achieving, underrepresented undergraduate, graduate students and faculty of color in STEM fields. She found that key motivators for their persistence in these fields were catalyzing change, improving communities, and being the Black/Latinx/Indigenous STEM professors that many of these students never had.