Broadly, my research interests include three main areas:

1. Cybersecurity Identity Development: I am interested in how students develop a cybersecurity identity through grades K-16. I believe career identity development is important for helping students feel connected to the career field they choose.

2. Cybersecurity Program Evaluation: Through my dissertation, I have developed a strong interest in understanding how undergraduate cybersecurity students and faculty members view their respective cybersecurity programs. My prior work has focused on NSA CAE institutions and I hope to continue working with these institutions and broaden my research to non-CAE affiliated schools.

3. Retention in Computer Science and Cybersecurity: I am interested in understanding how program structure, curriculum sequencing and complexity, and other factors affect retention in CS and Cybersecurity programs.

Research Papers

Belle, L., Aronno, D., Thomas, M., & Cateté, V. (2026) What Are We Teaching? An Audit of Open-Access K–12 Cybersecurity Curricula. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Cybersecurity and Information Technology Education (ACM SIGCITE), November 12-14, 2026, Wilmington, NC, USA

Thomas, M., Pitts, G., Shoupe, S., Kossick, C., Mazzetta, V., White, I., & Cateté, V. (2026) Students’ Engagement and Perceptions of Cybersecurity Education throughout an Informal Learning Program. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Cybersecurity and Information Technology Education (ACM SIGCITE), November 12-14, 2026, Wilmington, NC, USA

White, I., Thomas, M., Catete, V. (2025) A New Method of Collaboration in Block-Based Programming Environments. In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) (FIE 2025). November 2-5, 2025. Nashville, TN, USA. 

Clear, A., Impagliazzo, J., Fokum, D., Kazmi, Z., Messer, M., Pereira, T., Pow-Sang, J., Thomas, M., & Zhang, M. (2025) Exploring the Effectiveness of Computing Curricular Recommendations. Part of the 3rd ACM Global Computing Education Conference (CompEd 2025), October 23-25th 2025, Gaborone, Botswana. doi: 10.1145/3815397.3815773

Thomas, M., Elmore, E., Chavez, B., Ruth, R., Avery, C., Cukier, M., & Catete, V. (2024) Breaking Barriers: Implementing a Cybersecurity Education for Underserved Secondary School Students. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2024). July 9-10, 2024. Milan, Italy. doi: 10.1145/3649217.3653581

Sthapit, S., Thomas, M., Brock, J., & Barnes, T. (2024). Cracking the Cultural Code: Understanding the Cultural Barriers for Asian International CS Students in the US. In Proceedings of 2024 Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2024). May 16-17, 2024. Atlanta, GA, USA. doi:10.1145/3653666.3656078

Thomas, M., (2022). Developing Training Materials to Supplement the Indiana Cybersecurity Scorecard. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.

Madamanchi, A., Thomas, M., Magana, A., Heiland, R., & Macklin, P. (2019). Supporting computational apprenticeship through educational and software infrastructure. a case study in a mathematical oncology research lab. doi:10.1080/10511970.2021.1881849

Note: All of the above works should be publicly available on the respective website or ResearchGate. If there is a paper you are interested in reading that is not available, please send me an email and I am happy to send you a copy. My full list of publications are in my CV.