Malaika W McKee

Malaika W McKee serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and holds a joint appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Her interdisciplinary work bridges educational policy, social justice, and computational research methodologies.

Her research centers on recovering Black women's lived experiences through big data analytics and statistical modeling, addressing historical erasure in archival systems. She investigates resistance strategies among African American mothers in urban contexts and examines commitment drivers for pre-service teachers in underserved schools, contributing to critical race theory and educational equity frameworks.

McKee's publication record demonstrates consistent innovation in applying computational methods to social science questions, particularly in digital humanities and educational data mining. Her work shows increasing integration of high-performance computing with qualitative social analysis since 2014.

Her research has been recognized with:

• HPC Innovation Excellence Award (2016) for rescuing Black women's histories using big data

At NCSA, she collaborates on cross-disciplinary teams developing statistical models to analyze large-scale educational datasets and historical archives, focusing on intersectional identity frameworks and resistance narratives.