Dr. Maggie Melo completed her PhD at the University of Arizona, where she was an American Association of University Women Fellow. She co-founded the University of Arizona’s first publicly accessible and interdisciplinary makerspace – the iSpace (now CATalyst Studios) – and strategically facilitated its growth from a 400-square-foot room in the Science-Engineering Library to a 5,000-square-foot facility housed in the University’s Main Library.
She also founded the Women Techmakers Tucson Hackathon, the Southwest’s first women’s-only hackathon. She has given keynote addresses and invited-talks at regional and national conferences, including the Google Developer Group’s North American Summit.
Her research specialization resides at the intersection of critical making and the development of equitable and inclusive STEM-rich learning spaces (e.g. makerspaces) in libraries. Her work has appeared in Libraries and the Academy, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Computers and Composition Online, among others.
She received an NSF CAREER Award in 2020 for a project titled "Equity in the Making: Investigating Spatial Arrangements of Makerspaces and Their Impact on Diverse User Populations," and now directs the Equity in Making (EITM) Lab (link is external)at SILS.