MƒA teachers can register for this event on the Small-World Network. Other guests can register here.
Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium
160 Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor
The MƒA Thursday Think Speaker Series brings accomplished speakers who dive into cutting-edge topics in STEM education to MƒA. These talks, held once a month throughout the school year, invite MƒA teachers and the general public to learn and engage with these thought leaders and professionals in mathematics, science, and education.
Computer science (CS) courses tend to be the most male-dominated of any discipline and are still largely white and Asian in terms of race. As CS impacts all areas of our society and offers significant career advantages, increasing representation of marginalized groups in the field is imperative. What can schools and educators do to address this challenge?
In this talk, Dr. Maria Klawe, former president of Harvey Mudd College (HMC) and MƒA’s new president, describes how, in the span of 17 years, HMC raised the percentage of female-identifying students majoring in computer science from 15% to 50% and the percentage of Black and Latinx students from less than 10% to over 30%. She also discusses some approaches to changing these demographics, including attracting and retaining those from historically marginalized groups, differentiating courses, encouraging collaboration, and providing real-world challenges.
Dr. Maria Klawe joined Math for America as president in November 2023. Klawe began her tenure as Harvey Mudd College’s (HMC) fifth president in 2006 and served until 2023. Prior to joining HMC, she served as dean of engineering and professor of computer science at Princeton University. Maria joined Princeton from the University of British Columbia (UBC), serving in various roles from 1988 to 2002. Before UBC, she spent eight years with IBM Research in California and two years at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. (1977) and B.Sc. (1973) in mathematics from the University of Alberta. Klawe is a board member of Phenome Health and the nonprofits EdReports, the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, and the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath). She is a founding advisory board member of Parity.org and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She received the 2014 Women of Vision ABIE Award for Leadership and the 2017 Academic Leadership Award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
