Ethics Training for Engineers in Emerging Technologies and Fieldwork in Developing Communities

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will emphasize integrative ethics training for students in engineering laboratory research and fieldwork in water and sanitation infrastructure in developing communities. The goal of this research and education project is 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. This will be achieved by four objectives; i) to educate students about the ethical issues associated with their work in emerging technologies and fieldwork in developing communities; ii) 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; iii) to make students articulate in dialogue on issues of ethics in the professions of science and engineering, iv) to document, evaluate, and disseminate the results of the project to educators and practitioners in science and engineering. The intent is for this research to serve as a model for integrating ethics and engineering in other engineering disciplines besides Systems Engineering, and that it will be possible to create a community of students pursuing ethics and engineering at the University of Virginia and at the University of Colorado-Boulder, that could be modeled elsewhere.