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In knowledge production and dissemination processes, participation from diverse populations matters; without inclusion of voices across all spectrums of society, produced knowledge remains incomplete. In this dissertation, I present three projects related to the identification of inequity in the production of knowledge and its dissemination. In the first project, I look at the diversity of network science scholars. With the help of volunteers at the Network Science Institute, I identified the race and gender of highly cited authors of the most highly cited papers in the discipline based on a dataset collated from Microsoft Academic Graph. This list is augmented with invited speakers at NetSci, the most prominent conference in network science. We find that both women and non-white researchers continue to be underrepresented in both publication and citation rates. In the second project, I created a list of 4,469 experts mentioned in news articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic and hand-coded the expertise, gender, and race of these individuals with the help of volunteers from the COVID-19 Dispersed Volunteer Research Network. By creating a co-mention network between these experts, I explore the gender and racial imbalance in quoted experts, and the intensity of interaction we see between public health experts and policymakers during a crisis. Finally, in the third project, I construct a network between US institutions of higher education who received NSF ADVANCE grants, awarded to help implement institutional level intervention to reduce gender inequity in STEM fields. Using a mixed effect model, I examine the effect of organizational characteristics and network position on the diffusion of innovative change strategies.

Dissertation Committee:

• Laura K. Nelson, Chair Assistant Professor of Sociology University of British Columbia
• David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor Network Science Institute Northeastern University
• Kathrin S. Zippel, Professor of Sociology Northeastern University
• Maimuna S. Majumder, Faculty of the Computational Health Informatics Program Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School