Maria Ong

Maria (Mia) Ong, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist and Evaluator at TERC. She is also the Founder and Director of Project SEED (Science and Engineering Equity and Diversity), a social justice collaborative affiliated with The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. For over twenty years, she has conducted empirical research focusing on women of color in higher education and careers in STEM and has led evaluation of several STEM diversity/inclusion programs. Dr. Ong’s work has appeared in reports to U.S. Congress and to the U.S. Supreme Court and in journals such as Social Problems and Harvard Educational Review, and she was an invited speaker at the 2016 White House meeting on inclusive education in STEM. Between 1996 and 2000, she directed an undergraduate physics program for students of color and women at the University of California at Berkeley; for this work, she was a co-recipient of a U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.

Mia is former Chair of the Social Science Advisory Board at the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) and a former member of the NSF Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, the NSF Advisory Committee for the GPRA Performance Assessment, and the NSF Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Studies in Education from U.C. Berkeley.