Dr. Annie M. Wofford (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Higher Education program in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and a Senior Research Associate with FSU’s Center for Postsecondary Success. Broadly, her research examines how institutional structures of higher education maintain disparities across students’ access and success in postsecondary education. Much of Dr. Wofford’s work addresses the structures that shape students’ pathways to graduate education and their development as graduate students. She uses critical quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate specific university environments (e.g., STEM disciplinary spaces) and relationships (e.g., mentoring networks), with the goal of informing how institutions can enhance structural support for students who have faced barriers due to their gender, racial/ethnic, social class, and/or first-generation backgrounds.
Dr. Wofford currently serves as the PI of a mixed-methods research project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation entitled, “Aligning Graduate Education and Workforce Opportunities: A Robust, Equity-Focused Landscape Scan of Computing Terminology.” This project is affiliated with the Center for Postsecondary Success at FSU, and Dr. Wofford leads this research in community with Dr. Lara Perez-Felkner (FSU Higher Education) and Dr. Bret Staudt Willet (FSU Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies). Dr. Wofford’s research has also been externally funded by the Inclusive Graduate Education Network, ACPA Foundation, American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division D, and P.E.O. International. She also serves as the Associate Director for the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium.
Her independent and collaborative research has been published in many well-regarded outlets, including top-tier higher education journals (e.g., The Journal of Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, Higher Education, Research in Higher Education). Dr. Wofford also serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education and Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education. In 2023-2024, she was selected as a National Science Foundation Quantitative Research Methods in STEM Education Fellow. Her research has also been featured in broad access outlets, such as Inside Higher Ed and via the Future of Florida Work podcast. Further, Dr. Wofford received the Dissertation of the Year award from the AERA Special Interest Group for Graduate and Postdoctoral Education Across the Disciplines (SIG 168), a SIG for which she now serves on the board.
At FSU, Dr. Wofford has taught higher education content and educational methods courses (e.g., Higher Education in America, Public Policy in Higher Education, Applied Education Policy Analysis). She is passionate about putting her research on equity-minded mentoring into practice with master’s and doctoral students, and she enjoys holistic and mutually generative collaborations with students.
Prior to joining the faculty at FSU, Dr. Wofford earned a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies Education at the University of Central Missouri, a master’s degree in Higher Education Administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (where she also worked full-time in admissions for the UMKC School of Medicine), and a Ph.D. in Higher Education and Organizational Change from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She also completed a postdoctoral scholar position at Northern Arizona University on an NSF-funded project addressing community college transfer students’ pathways to graduate education in computer science.
Select Recent Publications
Winkler, C. E., & Wofford, A. M. (2024). Trends and motivations in critical quantitative educational research: A multimethod examination across higher education scholarship and author perspectives. Research in Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.0.3.239/s11162-024-09802-w
Wofford, A. M., Smith, K. N., & Branch, B. L. (2024). “I found my home there”: Exploring women’s engineering identity in STEM student organizations. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 61(3), 336-350. https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2023.2181085
Blaney, J. M., Hernandez, T. E., Wofford, A. M., & Feldon, D. F. (2024). “That sounds like something geniuses do”: Exploring how vertical transfer computing students conceptualize PhD pathways. The Review of Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.0.a926783
Newhouse, K. N. S., Lehman, K. J., Wofford, A. M., & Sendowski, M. (2024). Doing and defining interdisciplinarity in undergraduate computing. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 24(3), Article 29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3654676
Wofford, A. M. (2024). They say goodbye, we say hello: Understanding the relational phases of equity-minded STEMM graduate-undergraduate mentorship. Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 32(2), 184-205. https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2024.2323476
Blaney, J. M., Hernandez, T. E., Feldon, D. F., & Wofford, A. M. (2024). Transfer student receptivity in patriarchal STEM contexts: Evidence of gendered transfer student stigma in computer science from a mixed methods study. Community College Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00915521231218233