Thema Monroe-White

Thema Monroe-White (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence, and Innovation Policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science (joint) at George Mason University. Her interests include bias mitigation in artificial intelligence (AI), critical quantitative and computational methods, and racial equity in innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E). She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic empowerment for minoritized groups via I&E, AI education, and emancipatory data science. She has received multiple NSF awards to investigate issues of racial equity in the STEM ecosystem, including serving as a lead member of the research team for the Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4), a $3.5 million cooperative partnership to develop a national infrastructure for diversity and inclusion within the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) Program.  Inspired by her work on intersectional inequalities in science, she has also received funding to investigate the harms of structural racism on the scientific enterprise, and the benefits derived by the inclusion of historically marginalized groups in the scientific workforce. Thema holds a Ph.D. in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as Master's and Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology from Howard University.

As YDSL’s head of external research, Thema leads partnerships with external partners focused on research and evaluation. Thema’s work empowers us to learn from our students’ and educators’ rapidly evolving needs and contribute to public scholarship on the emerging fields of critical AI literacy and data science education.