Leadership Fellows Residency II

Dr. Stephanie Luster-Teasley

Stephanie Luster-Teasley, Ph.D., serves as the interim dean of the College of Engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Before her current role, she served as the vice provost for undergraduate education from 2020 – 2022 and professor and chair of the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering from 2016 – 2020. She graduated from North Carolina A&T in 1996 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and continued her graduate studies at Michigan State University (MSU) where she received her M.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering. She joined the faculty at N.C. A&T in 2004, after working in private industry as an environmental engineer. Her research specializations include environmental remediation, water sustainability and engineering education. Over the last 18 years, she has been driven by a deep commitment and care for her students and lauded for bringing the excitement of real-world, hands-on experience into all her engineering courses and mentoring activities.

Luster-Teasley has demonstrated excellence in teaching, research and service. Her honors include the 2005 National Women of Color in Technology Educational Leadership Award, the 2006 N.C. A&T State University Rookie Researcher of the Year Award and the 2008 N.C. A&T State University Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. In May 2013, her teaching and engineering education work resulted in her receiving the 2013 UNC Board of Governors Teaching Excellence Award. This honor is one of the highest awards conferred for teaching in the UNC System. In 2014, she received the Dupont Minorities in Engineering Award at the National American Society for Engineering Education National Conference. In 2018, she was recognized as a recipient of the Black Engineer of the Year Innovation Award. In 2020, she received the Michigan State University Civil and Environmental Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in recognition of her professional accomplishments and was recently invited to serve on the MSU College of Engineering Alumni Advisory Board.

Luster-Teasley’s research accomplishments include receiving patents from the United States, Great Britain and Canada for her development of a controlled release chemical oxidation polymer system for the remediation of water and wastewater. This recognition designates her as the first African American woman and the first faculty member at N.C. A&T to receive international patents. Her technology was licensed in 2017 by a company to market nationally as an emerging remediation method for groundwater and soil contamination.

For service to the community, Luster-Teasley has led several major initiatives. In 2010, she led the A&T team that developed the winning National 4-H Science Youth Day experiment used by millions of K-8 students worldwide. This outreach activity taught students about global warming and energy use.

During her career, Luster-Teasley has received funding from the Department of Education for developing a mentoring program for students in STEM disciplines, the National Science Foundation for developing and implementing case studies modules in science labs, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to implement science programs for middle school girls. She serves as a co-PI of the N.C. A&T ADVANCE-IT grant, which seeks to increase equity and help implement programs for female faculty to successfully progress through academia from assistant to full professorship. Overall, her disciplinary, science education research, and professional development grants have yielded over $7.5 million in funding.

She is the mother of two sons who are also both Aggies engineers. Her oldest completed his B.S. in Computer Sci- ence and M.S. in Computer Systems Technology. Her youngest son is an Industrial Engineering major.

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 quantifi- cations 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 en- hancements 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.

She has written numerous op-eds that have appeared in Science, The Washington Post, Diverse Issues in High-
er Education, Nature Human Behaviour and Cancer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Higher Education Today, Education Week, British Broadcasting Company. Her research has appeared in Science, US News & World Report, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, The Hechinger Report, NPR Codeswitch, The Tennes- sean, and the Washington Monthly.

Visit the EDEFI website at www.blackengineeringphd.org/
Visit the ICQCM website at www.icqcm.org/
LinkedIn Page: www.linkedin.com/in/ebony-mcgee-b0328211/ Twitter handle: @Relationshipgap

Dr. Carolyn Meyers

Carolyn Winstead Meyers has been recognized for her contributions as an educator, me- chanical engineer, and academic administrator. Upon receiving the Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University in 1968, Dr. Meyers worked as an engineer for two divisions of General Electric. After relocating to Atlanta, Dr. Meyers received the Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1979 and the doctorate (Metallurgy, School of Chemical Engineering) in 1984 also from Georgia Tech. In 2016, Pardee Rand Graduate School awarded the honorary Doctor of Public Policy to Dr. Meyers.

Dr. Meyers was appointed as the first woman Dean of the College of Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University and later served for several years as the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs there. In between appointments at A&T, Dr. Meyers served as a Program Officer of two divisions of the National Science Foundation. While in North Carolina and later in Virginia, she also served as a member of the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE), and member of three Advisory Committees for the NSF, member of the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Board of the Department of Energy, United States Air Force (USAF) Summer Faculty Fellow at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and the Advisory Board to RTI International as well as the Moses Cone Health Systems Trustees.

Dr. Meyers served as the fourth President of Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia for four years. While in the position, Dr. Meyers obtained the funding for the present new library and academic quadrangle new classroom buildings with its now landmark bell tower. Her most recent position prior to retirement was as the tenth president of Jackson State University (JSU) in Jackson, Mississippi. While there, Apple Inc. named JSU as an Apple Distinguished School for two consecutive periods, the campus was updated technologically (totally wireless, faculty and campus facilities were electronically enhanced), the campus Library was redesigned as a 21st century interactive learning facility, enrollment surged to the highest in JSU’s history, satellite campuses were opened, faculty and staff received regular raises, athletic teams won six conference championships, and research expenditures grew. And former First Lady Michelle Obama selected JSU for her last commencement speech in 2011.

Dr. Meyers has been featured in a wide range of honors and publications, including numerous editions of Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the South and Southwest, Who’s Who of American Women, Who’s Who of Emerging Leaders in America, and Who’s Who in the World. In addition, Dr. Meyers was selected for inclusion in the 7th edition of Who’s Who in American Education, as well as the 5th and 8th editions of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering.

The legislatures of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of Mississippi each cited her for excellence in leadership and in 1996, she was inducted into the Georgia Tech Academy of Distinguished Alumni.

Currently, mostly retired, she is honored to serve as a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (CASL), a leader in transforming higher education in STEM to enhance our nation’s future and promise. She is the mother of three children and the grandmother of four.

Dr. Loretta Moore

Dr. Loretta A. Moore is a proven academic and a demonstrated thought leader where her expe- riences span academia, private industry, and the Federal Government. She currently serves as a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Jackson State University (JSU). She recently served as an Executive-level Expert and completed a four-year rotation as the former Section Head for the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) in the Office of Integrative Activities, Office of the Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Prior to joining NSF, Dr. Moore served as Vice President for Research and Federal Relations at JSU, where she increased the research competitiveness of JSU, and as Associate Vice President for Research and Scholarly Engagement, where she successfully enhanced the careers of JSU faculty members across all disciplines through the Academy for Research and Scholarly Engagement. Dr. Moore also served as Interim Associate Dean for the College of Science, Engineering and Technology and as Chair of the Department of Computer Science, a position she held for thirteen years. She has also held positions at Auburn University, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Army Research Laboratory, NASA Kennedy Space Center and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

Dr. Moore’s current research focuses on uncoding coded bias in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems and strategies for increasing research competitiveness for individuals, institutions, and jurisdictions. In addition to her research contributions in Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interactions, she is recognized for her expertise in addressing issues related to barriers and bias in broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in the scientific enterprise. As a former NSF Principal Investigator at an Historically Black University, her research portfolio included the JSU ADVANCE project, focusing on advancing the careers of female faculty members in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics and Social and Behavioral Science disciplines. Her achievements in leveraging diversity and equity to advance a globally diverse STEM workforce and promoting institutional change for inclusive and equitable STEM environments contributed to her appointment to the congressionally mandated Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering. Her expertise in Computer Science led to her appointment to NSF’s Advisory Committee for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and an appointment to the U.S. Army Scientific Advisory Board.

Dr. Moore received her B.S. degree in Computer Science from Jackson State University and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology.

Dr. Marcia Owens

Marcia Allen Owens serves as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Florida A&M University (FAMU) and Director for the Center for Faculty ADVANCEment. She is the first Black woman to earn tenure and ascend to the rank of Full Professor in the FAMU School of the Environment. Dr. Owens earned a B.S. in Biology from Jackson State University and the Ph.D., J.D., and M.Div. degrees from Emory University. An environmental lawyer and transdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Owens’ specific research interests and publication areas include environmental

literacy, environmental justice, and religion and ecology. Her current and past impact as thesis/dissertation chair and committee member results in more than 20 Black students earning master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Science. Another area of significant research is the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Black women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and social and behavioral sciences (SBS) professions, with a specific interest in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

As Principal Investigator of FAMU’s $2.97 million National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant (HRD-1824267), she serves as the founding Director of The Center for Faculty ADVANCEment
at FAMU. Dr. Owens is leading the effort to examine and change institutional policies and practices that impact women’s recruitment, retention, and promotion in STEM and the social and behavioral sciences. Her work in The Feminist Wire shed light on the existence of microagressions against Black women in STEM at HBCUs. Her voice is amplified in the acclaimed volume Presumed Incompetent-II: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (2020) and Maternal Connections: When Daughter Becomes Mother (2022). Her views on gender equity in STEM have also been featured on several podcasts and panels, including NSF ADVANCE, STEMming in Stilettos, Engineering Change, and Modern Figures.

Dr. Zakiya Wilson-Kennedy

Zakiya S. Wilson-Kennedy, Ph.D., is the Ron and Dr. Mary Neal Distinguished Associate Professor of Chemistry Education and the Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion within the College of Science at Louisiana State University (LSU). Her research investigates the persistence of individuals from all backgrounds in STEM higher education and careers, focusing on faculty and student recruitment, retention, and success. Through these efforts, she employs mentoring models that integrate the theories of identity development, empowerment, social cognitive career theory, and community cultural wealth to create and test development structures that cultivate self-efficacy and agency, particularly for groups historically underrepresented in STEM.

Dr. Wilson-Kennedy is a firm believer in collaboration and has led and co-led a number of institutional initiatives de- signed to broaden the participation of groups underrepresented in STEM. Examples of this work include the freshman seminar course SCI 1001 which is designed to foster a sense of belonging during the critical transition from high school to college for aspiring scientists and mathematicians. Contributing to the leadership of our NSF-funded ADVANCE Catalyst project that seeks to increase gender equity within the faculty ranks. And the Geaux Science Explorations STEM Outreach Initiative featured collaborations between leaders and faculty in the college and has impacted hundreds of students at the k-8 grade levels in Baton Rouge and beyond. All of these efforts were developed through teams of individuals working together to advance diversity.

Her work has been supported through extramural support from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Education, the Louisiana Board of Regents, and other agencies. Her education research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Science Education and Technology and the Journal of Chemical Education. She was the primary editor of a book, Broadening Participation in STEM: Effective Methods, Practices, and Programs (2019), within the Diversity in Higher Education Series published by Emerald, and coeditor of another book through ACS Publications entitled, Growing Diverse STEM Communities: Methodology, Impact, and Evidence (2019). She is also co-guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Chemical Education, entitled Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Respect in Chemistry Education Research and Practice (2022).

Dr. Wilson-Kennedy was recently elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021. She also served as the principal investigator for the 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) organizational recognition for the LSU Office of Strategic Initiatives and has received additional honors for her work in broadening participation, diversity, and STEM education: the NOBCChE Winifred Burks-Houck Award (2019) and Henry C McBay Outstanding Educator Award (2014), the ACS Stanley C. Israel Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences (2011), Woman of Color STEM Achievement Award for Promotion of Education at the Collegiate Level (2011), the National Administrator Role Model Award from Minority Access, Inc. (2009), and the LSU Outstanding Staff Award (2009). She is a charter member of the Society of STEM Women of Color and the Metropolitan Baton Rouge Chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. She is also a founding contributor to the American Chemical Society (ACS) Women Chemists of Color Initiative. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Jackson State University and her doctorate in inorganic chemistry from Louisiana State University.