This award is made under Ethics Education in Science and Engineering. The award will enable the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to direct an educational project whereby eight of its member institutions will be funded to develop interdisciplinary research-ethics programs for graduate students in science and engineering. The project will engage a cadre of graduate deans who can serve as leaders in a nation-wide effort to institutionalize ethics education as a regular feature of graduate programs in science and engineering. Graduate deans participating in the project will work on their own campuses to establish steering committees, interdisciplinary faculty training programs, and university-wide seminars and workshops on ethics education. They will involve faculty from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, history, and sociology, to ensure that the training received by students is sufficiently broad-based, and sufficiently inclusive of perspectives that cross ethnic and cultural boundaries, to equip them with the ethical awareness, the ethical reasoning skills, and the conceptual tools that are needed to resolve unexpected new problems in the conduct of research. They will work together to develop assessment instruments to measure students' mastery of the key elements of responsible conduct of research, students' individual ethical development, and the ethical climate of the research enterprise itself. CGS will disseminate what is learned from the project by featuring the results in plenary and concurrent sessions at national meetings, in regular CGS publications and online communications, and in a culminating monograph on the "best practices" in ethics education in the targeted areas.
