Thema Monroe-White

George Mason University | GMU · Department of Computer Science

This pilot study explores the diversity of science teams in Colombia, focusing on disciplinary expertise, country affiliations, and gender composition. Leveraging data from OpenAlex (April 2024 snapshot), the study categorizes team diversity into three factors: variety (disciplinary expertise), separation (country affiliations), and disparity (gend...

The production of research and faculty in the US higher education system is concentrated within a few institutions. Concentration of research and resources affects minoritized scholars and the topics with which they are disproportionately associated. This paper examines topical alignment between institutions and authors of varying intersectional id...

The rapid emergence of generative Language Models (LMs) has led to growing concern about the impacts that their unexamined adoption may have on the social well-being of diverse user groups. Meanwhile, LMs are increasingly being adopted in K-20 schools and one-on-one student settings with minimal investigation of potential harms associated with thei...

The scientific workforce of the United States is mostly composed of white men. Barriers to entry and participation have been well-studied. However, few have adopted an intersectional perspective to examine the consequences of these inequalities in scientific knowledge. In this work, a large-scale bibliometric analysis is provided on the relationshi...

This article advocates for race-conscious science, technology, engineering/computer science, and mathematics (STEM) innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) education. Results from a national survey of the academic plans and career trajectories of underrepresented and minoritized (URM) STEM students and alumni suggest that URM STEM students need robus...

Data science for social good (DSSG) initiatives have been championed as worthy mechanisms for transformative change and social impact. However, researchers have not fully explored the systems by which actors coordinate, access data, determine goals and communicate opportunities for change. We contribute to the information systems ecosystems and the...

Despite findings highlighting the severe underrepresentation of women and minoritized groups in data science, most scholarly research has focused on new methodologies, tools, and algorithms as opposed to who data scientists are or how they learn their craft. This paper proposes that increased representation in data science can be achieved via advan...

The US scientific workforce is not representative of the population. Our analysis utilizes millions of scientific papers to study the relationship between scientists and the science they produce. We find a strong relationship between the characteristics of scientists and their research topics, suggesting that diversity changes the scientific portfo...

This study utilizes an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the career trajectories of information technology (I.T.) graduate students and professionals of color. Building on individual differences theory in the initial quantitative phase, data from a national survey of 356 STEM graduate students and prof...

This paper charts the rapid rise of data science methodologies in manuscripts published in top journals for third sector scholarship, indicating their growing importance to research in the field. We draw on critical quantitative theory (QuantCrit) to challenge the assumed neutrality of data science insights that are especially prone to misrepresent...

Racial disparity in academia is a widely acknowledged problem. The quantitative understanding of racial-based systemic inequalities is an important step towards a more equitable research system. However, because of the lack of robust information on authors’ race, few large-scale analyses have been performed on this topic. Algorithmic approaches off...

Significance The US scientific workforce is not representative of the population. Barriers to entry and participation have been well-studied; however, few have examined the effect of these disparities on the advancement of science. Furthermore, most studies have looked at either race or gender, failing to account for the intersection of these varia...

Background. Mentoring and immersive experiences through internships are important means of increasing underrepresented (UR) students’ persistence in public health. However, while the positive effects of mentoring are well established, studies on the effect of race/ethnicity and gender mentor matching on persistence have produced mixed results. Aims...

In this mixed-methods study, we performed content analysis on openended survey items to reveal primary themes related to how PhD students are responding to the Trump policies and the COVID-19 pandemic. In our data set, 40.7% of the respondents reported that their career plans have been affected by Trump’s antiscience policies, 54.5% by the COVID-19...

The cross-cutting and interdisciplinary nature of data work has created an opportunity to engage more students from diverse backgrounds in data science and has expanded pathways for entry for future data professionals. However, without greater representation of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized people of color in data science, we risk reinf...

Racial disparity in academia is a widely acknowledged problem. The quantitative understanding of racial-based systemic inequalities is an important step towards a more equitable research system. However, few large-scale analyses have been performed on this topic, mostly because of the lack of robust race-disambiguation algorithms. Identifying autho...

This paper uses a critical perspective (i.e., one that is grounded in historical conditions) via the actor network theory (ANT) framing and methodological approach to explain innovation adoption process of a novel data and knowledge management system in a public sector context of Ghana, West Africa. https://aisel.aisnet.org/sais2020/30

This study explores the pathways to K–12 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics instruction among Black/African American males in the Discovery Research Education for African American Men in STEM to Teach (DREAMS to Teach) program at Morehouse College, a Historically Black College and University located in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia. Many...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the Pathways to Innovation Program (Pathways), a faculty development and institutional change initiative designed to address the adaptive challenge of integrating innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) into undergraduate engineering, nationwide. In particular, we build upon earlier papers that describe the Pa...

In this article, we introduce the term “data science intelligence” as the verified and validated qualitative and quantitative outcomes of the data science workflow. This framing marries the disciplines of science policy and data science in order to empirically ground a way forward for mitigating public value failures resulting from the implementati...

This paper provides the framing and details of a two-part entrepreneurial mindset symposium that was organized with the following objectives: 1) build a community of entrepreneurial mindset researchers and practitioners, 2) define an entrepreneurial mindset framework, and 3) situate efforts to identify and measure dimensions of the entrepreneurial...

Purpose This paper aims to improve upon the initial quantitative assessment of Kerlin’s macro-institutional social enterprise (MISE) framework (Monroe-White et al., 2015) to test for the effect of country-level institutions on the social enterprise sector. Major improvements are the inclusion of the civil society variable and expansion of the cultu...

Social enterprise and innovation are inextricably linked in the literature (Chell et al. in Entrepr Reg Dev 22(6):485–493, 2010; Dees in Harv Bus Rev 76:54, 1998; Light in Stanf Soc Innov Rev 4(3):47–51, 2006). To date, research on social enterprise innovation has predominantly focused on micro-level factors, such as the social entrepreneur or orga...

Equal representation within higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and the STEM workforce in the United States across demographically diverse populations is a long-standing challenge. This study uses two-to-one nearest- neighbor matched-comparison group design to examine academic achievement, pursuit of gra...

There is a growing body of literature that acknowledges the overall trends in publication patterns in the least economically advantaged countries. The pattern shows that there are disparities between the Global North and Global South with regard to indexed publication output. Few studies, however, empirically assess the impact that this systematic...

Faculty are continually seeking new methods to help students develop characteristics associated with an entrepreneurial mindset. Recently, games have emerged as a popular tool to foster an entrepreneurial mindset through experiential based learning. This article provides an overview of the development of a workshop designed to teach faculty about g...

The Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter)'s initiative for faculty development and institutional change – called Pathways to Innovation (Pathways) – is working with U.S. engineering schools to embed innovation and entrepreneurship learning opportunities into the undergraduate experience. Pathways' program design is grounded in t...

The Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter)'s initiative for faculty development and institutional change — called Pathways to Innovation — is now working with more than 35 schools across the country to embed learning opportunities in innovation and entrepreneurship into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. At each institutio...

Purpose Kerlin (2013) offers a conceptual framework for country social enterprise models that allows countries to retain their unique understanding of social enterprise and better understand the factors influencing its development. This paper provides the first large data-set regression analysis to test Kerlin’s (2013) macro-institutional social en...

Incorporating entrepreneurship into the engineering curriculum is compelling for many reasons. Entrepreneurship education has been found to boost GPA and retention rates of engineering students, provides students with the skills and attitudes needed to innovatively contribute to existing organizations and pursue their own ventures, and has the pote...

This paper describes Pathways to Innovation (Pathways), a national program that uses a team-based guided change process to help faculty and institutions introduce and embed innovation and entrepreneurship into formal and informal educational experiences for undergraduate engineers. The paper briefly reviews the program design, its research-based fo...

This study proposes that social enterprises address needs that are unmet by markets and government, thereby generating essential public values. I propose that social enterprises fulfill essential public value failures via the search and exploitation of new opportunities—gaps left by markets and governments. I test this proposition through an explor...