This award is made under Ethics Education in Science and Engineering (NSF 05-532).
Doctoral students in engineering and the life, physical and social sciences face increasingly complex ethical issues in their careers. These students, tomorrow's professionals, need preparation to recognize ethical issues, to reason carefully about them, and to make responsible decisions in the face of difficult dilemmas. The Model Curriculum for Land Grant Universities in Research Ethics (LANGURE) addresses this problem. LANGURE's ultimate aim is to institutionalize the teaching of research ethics.
LANGURE is the first interdisciplinary, interinstitutional initiative to create a national network of eight land-grant universities (LGUs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) teaching research ethics to doctoral candidates in engineering and the physical, social and life sciences. LANGURE, based at North Carolina State University, involves a network of seven other universities: Hawaii, Iowa State, North Carolina A&T, NC Central, UNC-Fayetteville State, Purdue, and Wisconsin. Senior faculty and graduate students at these institutions will in Year 1 conjointly develop a one-credit course, "Introduction to Research Ethics," and then teach it in Years 2 and 3. Among its synergistic effects, LANGURE will create momentum for a required graduate course in research ethics at the participating schools.
Intellectual Merit: LANGURE will develop a novel suite of 15 interactive, online research-ethics modules covering statistics, nanotechnology, physics, chemical engineering, computer science, nuclear engineering, intellectual property, the role of women and underrepresented minority students in engineering and scientific research, and 7 other areas, and will train faculty and graduate students to use the materials developed. Intellectual advances will be made in several key areas of research ethics, including social and value questions associated with nanotechnology and agricultural biotechnology; statistical interpretation, use, and misuse; computer database privacy and equity of access, and the challenges facing minorities aspiring to careers in science and engineering.
Broader Impacts: During the project period, more than 100 science and engineering faculty members and graduate students on eight campuses will develop and test new a new research-ethics course containing a common core curriculum and discipline-specific modules. These faculty members will join ethicists on each campus to team-teach the course. Over the three-year period of the grant, the course will reach as many as 500 doctoral students. By developing alliances in science, engineering, and social-sciences education across the U.S., LANGURE will create an interinstitutional template to integrate research ethics education into LGU doctoral programs. It will enhance the research programs at three HBCUs, improve efforts to recruit minority students into science and engineering graduate study, enrich the training of dozens of high-school science teachers who will use a version of one of the modules to enliven units on agricultural biotechnology with a discussion of the technology's ethical dimensions, and broaden ethics education nationally by providing free online access to the course and modules. LANGURE will model and capitalize upon the efficiencies and synergies created when institutions collaborate.
