Principal Investigator: Garrick E. Louis

News:

"U.Va. Davis ‘Projects for Peace’ Prize Winners Making a Difference in the World" in E-News Online UVa, Sep 2008

"Information technology, please?" in Global Health Matters July - August, 2008  |  Volume 7, Issue 4

Project Goal:

To train engineering graduate students to integrate societal and ethical dimensions, including privacy, risk, equity, indigenous knowledge, and sustainability into their technical research in emerging technologies and fieldwork in developing communities.

Objectives:

  1. to educate students about the ethical issues associated with their work in emerging technologies and fieldwork in developing communities.

  2. to integrate ethics into the way students think about their work as evinced by the explicit mention of ethical issues in their experimental design, expected results, and analysis.

  3. to make students articulate in dialogue on issues of ethics in the professions of science and engineering, as evinced by their participation in a rich, integrative graduate seminar series with science and philosophy graduate students, invited presentations in ethics, and concluding with the publication of at least one article in a related peer reviewed journal or conference proceeding.

  4. to document, evaluate, and disseminate the results of the project to educators and practitioners in science and engineering.

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March 2006, AVISE (Tourou Water Team)

Project Description:

This project develops a graduate Engineering Ethics Program in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at the University of Virginia (UVA) and in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) at the University of Colorado-Boulder (UCB). The Engineering Ethics program will emphasize integrative ethics training in the areas of nanotechnology, materials engineering, tissue engineering, human computer interaction, and fieldwork in water and sanitation infrastructure in developing communities for engineering students in a rich environment with students from the sciences and liberal arts, and prominent speakers from a broad range of relevant interests. The goal will be to integrate ethics training with students’ thesis work. Average enrollment in the Engineering Ethics Program (EEP) at UVA is expected to be 8 students per year over the course of this project. The project is expected to result in a permanent graduate option in Engineering Ethics available to students from all departments in the school of engineering, instead of the limited option now only available to graduate students in Systems and Information Engineering. The permanent option will include topics pertinent to all the participating engineering disciplines and expects an average enrollment of 15 students per year. The program at UCB is expected to average 6 enrolled students per year, and eventually include all incoming students in the Engineering for Developing Communities graduate program in CEAE. The result will not only be new graduate experiences at these two campuses, but also a model for others to follow, one that will be widely disseminated and shared.

UCB has an established seminar series in Earth Systems Engineering, (http://ese.colorado.edu/seminars.htm), which will be the forum for speakers from the Engineering Ethics seminar series. Seminar speakers will talk at both schools. Fieldwork for students at UCB is funded through the work of Bernard Amadei and his Engineers Without Borders program. Thus, additional funding is not requested in this proposal for the Engineering Ethics program at UCB.