Activities, Projects & Initiatives

The Online Ethics Center provides students, educators, and practicing engineers and scientists with resources for understanding and addressing ethically significant problems that arise in their work.

INSS seeks to convene the a diverse group of individuals and experiences to accelerate the rate at which social aspects of sustainability are more authentically included in policy, planning, and research about the built environment. The INSS network will provide annual summits and year-long opportunities for networking and collaboration.

Series of global summits for leading scientists and engineers, educators, policy leaders, students, and the public to address grand challenges.

This project modified and enhanced the Online Ethics Center (OEC) to help principal investigators and institutions respond knowledgeably to NSF requirements for ethics education instituted as part of the America COMPETES Act of 2007.

A New Forum for Innovation in Preventing and Managing Violent Conflict. The roundtable is a forum for key stakeholders from government, industry, academia, and the NGO community to 1) consider how the application of technology and of knowledge and methods from engineering and science can serve the goals of violent conflict prevention, peacemaking, and peacekeeping and 2) explore opportunities for stakeholder collaboration and action on key issues

This project reviews and recognizes the variety of exceptional programs and strategies for improving engineers’ understanding of ethical and social issues and creates a resource for those who aim to improve the ethical development of engineers at their own institutions.

In 2010, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) received funding from the National Science Foundation to develop an online resource to provide “easy access to high quality case studies, best practices, and original scholarship in ethics in science, mathematics, and ...

This project convened current and emerging leaders in ethics and engineering who are working to improve the ethical development of engineering students at a workshop.

This collaborative educational project of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and Arizona State University (ASU) will develop new research and educational activities for graduate and undergraduate students focused on the international issue of energy in the 21st century.

Addressing Issues CEES activities address ethically significant issues that arise in engineering and scientific research, education, and practice. These issues arise for individual engineers and scientists as well as for social organizations and institutions. CEES projects engage a wide ...

NSF funded Partnership in International Research and Education (PIRE) grant on "Developing Low-Carbon Cities in the USA, China & India through Interdisciplinary Integration Across Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Social Sciences & Public Health"

The National Academies will develop a consensus report on the topic of ethical, legal, and societal issues relating to research on, development, and use of increasingly globally accessible and rapidly-changing technologies with potential military application, such as information technologies, ...

This NSF funded Phase I Climate Change Educational Partnership (CCEP) focuses on the impacts of climate change for engineered systems. The goal of the partnership is to develop a national network to catalyze, transform, and enhance education on the issues of climate change and engineered systems, including issues of governance, sustainability, justice, trust, and public engagement, to prepare current and future engineers, policymakers, and the public to meet these challenges.

New technologies have the potential to produce positive and unforeseeable (and possibly negative) results; among these are innovations in sustainability, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, and energy technology. By virtue of their expertise, engineers are in a unique position to understand, assess, ...

This project consisted of a 2-day workshop held on August 25 and 26, 2008, which covered several topics including the social environment of science and engineering education; the need for ethics education for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in science and engineering; models for effective programs; and assessment of approaches to ethics education.

This 2-day workshop co-sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in October, 2008, extended the discussion of engineering ethics into new areas of social justice and sustainable community development.

This project involved a workshop that brought together synthetic biology researchers and experts in engineering ethics and science and technology studies to discuss how engineering ethics can contribute to the positive potential of the field of synthetic biology. It was held in Washington DC on Sept. 29-30, 2010.