As a professor of diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, Dr. Ebony McGee investigates what it means to be racially marginalized while minoritized in the context of learning and achieving in STEM higher education and in the STEM professions. She studies in particular the racialized structures and institutional barriers that adversely affect the education and career trajectories of underrepresented groups of color, particularly focusing on STEM entrepreneurship. This 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 in these places and spaces. Her National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant investigates how marginalization undercuts success in STEM through psychological stress, interrupted how marginalization undercuts 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.
Education is Dr. McGee’s second career; She left a career in electrical engineering to earn a PhD in mathematics education from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Spencer
Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago, and a NSF Postdoctoral
Fellowship at Northwestern University. With funding from eleven NSF grants, She
cofounded and direct the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative or
EDEFI (pronounced “edify”). She also cofounded the Institute in Critical Quantitative and
Mixed Methodologies Training for Underrepresented Scholars (ICQCM), which aims to
be a go-to resource for the development of quantitative and mixed-methods skillsets
that challenge simplistic quantifications of race and marginalization. ICQCM receives
support from the NSF, The Spencer Foundation, and the W. T. Grant Foundation.
My latest research explores the relationship between STEM innovation and
entrepreneurship, whose infrastructure requires enhancements to support a more
diverse population of founders and business owners in STEM. She is part of the research
team for National GEM Consortium’s Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4), which is a
$3.5 million cooperative partnership with the NSF to develop a national diversity and
inclusion infrastructure for the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Program. This program
supports academic researchers in launching successful tech startups through
entrepreneurial training, particularly translating their research discoveries from the
laboratory to the marketplace.
Dr. McGee’s first solo-authored book is entitled “Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM
Education Stifles Innovation.” Her research has been featured in prominent media outlets, including The Atlantic, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Nature Human Behavior and Cancer, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Higher Education Today, NPR’s Codeswitch, The
Hechinger Report, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, US News & World
Report, Inside Higher Education, Tennessean, Washington Monthly, and The UK Voice
Online.
