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This lecture expands upon the central thesis of my recent essay in American Scientist, “The Obligation to Act” (July-August 2021, 203-205), presenting an argument for the claim that the possession of specialist technical expertise entails an obligation to engage in moral and political action in connection with the ways in which the products of one’s research are employed. The core argument builds upon an appreciation of the complex sociomoral topology of technical communities and their embedding in the larger polis, deriving the obligation to act from the cardinal civic virtue of “participation,” meaning active engagement in community life in support of human flourishing. The more abstract, philosophical argument will be grounded in compelling historical examples of scientists and engineers whose practice and principles gave expression to this ideal.
 

This panel discussion will present various perspectives on ambiguous research ethics scenarios confronting Institutional Review Boards. The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is the home to the section of the Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR 46, also called the Common Rule) dedicated to the protection of human participants in research. Originally created with the purpose of protecting participants in clinical trials in medical research, the purview of the Common Rule now also encompasses social and behavioral research. Despite the comprehensive nature of the stipulations articulated in the Common Rule, IRB reviewers often encounter ambiguities in applying the regulations to social and behavioral studies. The panelists for this presentation are current and past IRB chairs who are conducting a study to investigate faculty researcher perceptions of commonly encountered ambiguities in social and behavioral research. Study participants will provide their perspectives of how hypothetical research projects should be handled by the IRB. Analyses will focus on relationships among participants’ perspectives, academic discipline, level of research focus, and institutional characteristics. The panelists will discuss the study results, competing perspectives of ethical issues surrounding the ambiguous research ethics scenarios, and implications for the creation of professional development resources for social/behavioral researchers and IRB members. 

When scientists and engineers undertake leadership roles, frustration and anxiety are frequent outcomes.  These technically-competent and capable individuals often decide that a return to more hard-core technical activities is the appropriate career path.  Such results are frequently due to a lack of professional skills or competencies that are needed when technical and people problems intersect (sociotechnical issues).  This workshop will describe the traits and mindset that inhibit effective technical leadership and how technically-trained individuals can transition into proficient and effective leaders/managers by taking advantage of diversity within teams and organizations.  Each person has specific expertise, beliefs, values, priorities, culture, experiences, and personality.  Leaders must use these differences to promote interdependence, establish collegiality and respect among team members, and thereby successfully solve difficult technical problems.  Topics to be covered include servant leadership, emotional intelligence, and team building/teamwork.  Small groups will be formed to discuss/debate how to approach a variety of sociotechnical problems that are often encountered by early- and mid-career scientists and engineers.

Despite its trust of science and scientists in general, the public is not always willing to accept the scientific community’s consensus when it comes to a handful of topics such as evolution and climate change, apparently owing to a mixture of ignorance and ideology. Teachers in the public schools are expected, if not always ideally equipped, to address ignorance, but what are they supposed to do about the ideologies and their underlying values that obstruct understanding and acceptance of science? Emphasis on the nature of science, through both content and pedagogy, is often recommended, and there is convincing evidence of its efficacy. But the conception of the nature of science is undergoing enrichment, thanks to a number of philosophers of science who have urged for the scientific endeavor to be recognized as structured by distinctive values and regulated by distinctive virtues. The enriched conception of the nature of science helps not only to systematize the ways in which the nature-of-science approach is presently implemented but also to suggest fruitful ways of developing it further. Increasing and improving the treatment of the nature of science in the public schools’ science classroom along these lines will help to restore the public’s trust in science and scientists with respect to topics that are socially but not scientifically controversial.

Teaching science to six to ten year olds around the world yields direct experience with the challenges of communicating critical thinking to diverse audiences— simultaneously, and using only materials no more difficult to obtain than toilet paper. Having my students Zoom views from their own windows makes my job easier; adapting materials so those in lockdowns can fully participate makes my job harder. Global weather reports, comparing seasons across hemispheres, and evidence that the Earth spins line up on screen neatly, in gallery view. My outschool.com students watch the sun set for a classmate in Hong Kong as it rises for me in Montreal while they eat lunch in London. A young learner reporting warm sunny weather in Los Angeles listens to a classmate in rural Nebraska who spent the morning breaking the ice on water troughs for the calves on his family farm. An urban, environmentally-minded student absorbs another community’s reality during a lesson on sound when her classmate in the Arctic says appreciatively “Well, I’ve tasted Narwhal, but I never thought that was what it sounded like”. Online learning is a connector, helping to break down barriers to understanding based solely on distance and location. However, getting to this point takes effort on three fronts. Learners must be convinced to: 1) get outside (some seldom leave their houses), 2) make observations (many are new to this), and 3) share them (using words, drawings, or demos)

Attendees are invited to visit exhibits in the College and Graduate School Fair

Synthetic biology is bringing together engineers, physicists and biologists to model, design and construct biological circuits out of proteins, genes, and other bits of DNA, and to use these circuits to rewire and reprogram organisms.  These re-engineered organisms are going to change our lives in the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, rapid diagnostic tests, and synthetic probiotics to treat infections and a range of complex diseases.  In this talk, we highlight recent efforts to create synthetic gene networks and programmable cells and discuss a variety of synthetic biology applications in biotechnology and biomedicine.

Excellence is a term that is often used in STEM as a shorthand for all that one must aspire to, but what do people really mean by excellence? In our view, cultures of excellence must encompass more than just what is done; how the work is done is also critical. In our proposed workshop on the topic of Cultures of Excellence, we aim to provide participants with resources and tools they can implement in their home institutions in order to foster a more complete definition of excellence.

Our presentation will detail our ongoing project supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and provide hands-on exposure to some of the tools and skills we incorporate into an emerging curriculum, Labs That Work... for Everyone, promoting and creating cultures of excellence characterized by rigor, reproducibility, inclusion, and integrity. The workshop is intended to encourage participants to think broadly about the responsible conduct of research, leadership, and professional ethics.

We will:

• present elements of the HHMI Labs That Work leadership development program, featuring an interactive mix of videos and exercises 
• incorporate hands-on practice using NCPRE core concepts and tools, including how we intermix personal responsibility through an analytical decision-making framework (DMF), awareness of career TRAGEDIES, developing and using personal scripts, having difficult conversations and managing conflict constructively
• discuss the iREDS protocol as a central element to stimulate collaborative discussions within labs about research integrity, including data management, authorship, mentorship, and more

Beyond Telescopes: Foundational and Applied Physics to Protect Mauna Kea

For my PhD in physics, the indigenous knowledge that construction of ever-larger telescopes is unsustainable is the starting point of my scientific inquiry rather than the stopping point: the aim of my research is to make reflector telescopes obsolete as a technology by going back to the drawing board, the foundations of physics, and incorporating size and portability as a design constraint for a new technology. The inspiration for this mission is the history of the reflector telescope, which was invented by Sir Isaac Newton in the 1600s. His reflector telescope used mirrors instead of lenses, and even though it fit in the palm of his hand, it outperformed the forty-six-meter-long Galilean telescope constructed during his lifetime, the largest in history. Proponents of the proposed Thirty-Meter-Telescope (TMT) create narratives that the movement to protect Mauna Kea is hindering science, as though this proposed telescope, the largest version of Newton’s invention in history, is the only way that astronomy and cosmology can progress. I argue for viewing the impasse to the TMT as the crisis that precedes scientific paradigm shift, and outline an applied physics research strategy to rethink astronomy research technology. By reframing the problems created by the colonial astronomy industry in Hawai’i in context of the history of physics, my research brings Hawaiian knowledge into cross-cultural dialogue with mainstream physics, and strives toward a vision of an abundant future for science and the humanity, creating space for new insights and innovation.

Religion, Politics, and Public Suspicion of Scientific Claims

The impact of religion and politics on public acceptance of scientific factual claims increases the need for ethical standards in research and publication as well as the need to communicate with awareness of the political polarization that has resulted due to mistrust. Scientists must pay close attention to the rigors of their research and to ethical guidelines more than ever today. I will use examples from advances in biomedical technology and genetics to show the need to address ethical challenges before the widespread use of beneficial developments. Transparent communication is essential, and findings must be the most rigorous and current, and made comprehensible to the lay public. Scientists must be prepared to defend claims against alternative views. Public rejection of scientific claims calls for skilled techniques of messaging that takes into account route causes behind objections to facts. Scientists must win allies who speak the language of religion and politics to assist with relaying crucial information that must be embraced for our survival.

Building an International Energy Engineering Education Virtual Exchange

Using remote instruction practices developed during COVID-19 online instruction, collaborators at the University of Florida (UF) and Aswan University (ASWU) in Egypt are building an energy engineering education virtual exchange. This program’s key element is simultaneous deployment of @HOLM™ laboratory kits for remote hands-on instruction in undergraduate fluid mechanics courses at both institutions. This technology in concert with real-time video conferencing (e.g., Zoom) enables Egyptian and American students to collaborate on energy science experiments. The resulting international student and faculty interactions will 1) grow technical and cultural knowledge, 2) improve digital literacy for all participants, 3) and seed rich discussions of professional character virtues and values expected of all professionals in the sciences and engineering. The @HOLM™ kits embody Engineering Education Laboratory Module (EELM™) pedagogy, which emphasizes economical, hands-on, “turn-key” activities that can be incorporated into any STEM curricula by recognizing that energy studies permeate all STEM fields. Kit-based remote instruction is a central element to forward-looking comprehensive STEM education because it eliminates barriers (political, economic, cultural) while promoting equity, access, and inclusion in STEM education and pedagogical research. This presentation highlights lessons learned in planning to implement an international energy engineering education virtual exchange that are valuable for pedagogical researchers and STEM education practitioners creating similar programs. Challenges trivial in domestic STEM education settings including time zone shifts, shipping laboratory hardware, synchronous interaction scheduling, and recognizing cultural and language differences among participants require deeper planning and thought when implemented as an international collaboration.

Using Human Rights Issues to Engage Students in STEM Courses

As STEM instructors we often choose to teach STEM courses with few explorations of social context. We tend to assume that students can make these connections on their own. By teaching how STEM topics relate to human rights issues, STEM instructors can model social responsibility for STEM majors and health professions students. In addition, it demonstrates a relevant need for STEM literacy for nonmajors. Human rights issues can be incorporated into the content with having to find space to bring in social issues, and without the concern that STEM content may be omitted in the process. In addition, this presentation addresses the concerns that human rights issues are topics of conflict, resistance, and indifference that should not be approached in traditional college STEM courses. Studies on science education reform promote this pedagogical approach because it prepares students to rationally approach the interdisciplinary nature of twenty-first century problems. This integrative learning is consistent with the science pedagogy recommendation of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, CCSS, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, NGSS, and Vision & Change. The pedagogy demonstrated in this presentation adds equity and inclusion to the curriculum and improves engagement of underserved students. Participants will be guided through the through the processes behind adding a human rights issue to the commonly taught STEM concepts. Ample resources about teaching with human rights will be provided.

Original High School STEM Research Experiences: The Effects on Degree and Career Choice in Self-selecting Students

Participation in original and independent STEM research during high school is found to improve a student’s enthusiasm, attitude, and interest in undergraduate STEM courses and future careers.  However, original research course offerings are most often available in elite specialized schools or exclusive summer programs where a small number of students is selected based on high achievement and/or ability level, thereby precluding typically-developed students who have a strong interest in science/mathematics yet average expectations of success.  In the current study, graduates from a typical public high school who selected to participate in original STEM research during high school are compared to similar students who did not participate.  In earlier work, we found those students participating in original research were significantly more likely to acquire a STEM degree from a four-year university (p<0.001) and more likely to currently be working in a STEM research career (p<0.001) than students who did not participate in original research regardless of interest level in STEM.  In this study, we include the variable of student interest in science/math in the non-participating students since we have determined the participating students have STEM interest. The rationale for implementing an original research experience in a typical high school curriculum is predicated on the positive impact of a student’s choice of an undergraduate degree as well as career choice in a STEM field thus addressing the gap created by a need for STEM professionals in America. 

Scientific Virtues Toolbox (SVT) approach within the literature on the responsible conduct of research (RCR)

The goal of this talk (and the review upon which it is based) is to situate a Scientific Virtues Toolbox (SVT) approach within the literature on the responsible conduct of research (RCR). The SVT approach traces its theoretical lineage back to Aristotle but it emphasizes the vocational virtues, both ethical and epistemic, at the core of science. By reviewing the RCR literature from a virtue-theoretic perspective, we highlight issues that scholars have identified as problematic in current RCR training and describe how a virtue-ethics approach addresses them. We provide a virtue-theoretic review of the main topics covered in the literature on RCR, from its scope, goals, methods, and assessment to common critiques. Along the way, we diagnose problems with RCR and review conceptual resources that a virtue perspective has for illuminating connections between ethical issues. This review provides a virtue-theoretic lens for examining RCR literature and introduces a method, the SVT approach, that can help fill gaps in current training models and give deeper meaning to research practices.

Just like any other workplace politics are a major part of the academic landscape. The success of scholars as they move into a faculty position could depend on how well they can navigate the sometimes rough waters of academic politics. This workshop focuses on how to consider the politics associated with applying for a faculty position, starting a new position or when they pursue promotion and tenure. Specific skills and approaches that will help you to survive and thrive in academic politics will be presented for all of these career steps. These skills that help navigate politics include networking, communication, emotional intelligence and conflict resolution. This workshop has components of didactic presentation as well as short group discussion exercises and case studies. The presentation will focus on presenting challenges and skills to overcome these challenges. It will be of use to all trainees who are interested in faculty positions as well as faculty members pursuing tenure and promotion, regardless of their specific discipline.

Responsible science communication is a core component of the scientific enterprise. As science innovates it brings about new challenges for society to address. Because of this continuous innovation it is ethically responsible for scientists to recognize potential impacts of their work and engage with society. Meaningful engagement involves identifying the interests of different stakeholder groups, including members of under-represented communities, and using respectful audience-centered messaging to engage people in a transparent and responsive conversation about the research and potential impacts. This communication is context-dependent – who are you communicating with? about what? and why? This workshop will address responsible communication in different contexts and explore how to ethically incorporate science communication at multiple stages of the research process. Through discussions and short exercises workshop participants will craft messages for different audiences and practice engaging in responsible and respectful dialog about their research and more generally about the scientific process. This workshop is appropriate for researchers of all levels.

Five Keys to Being a Great Explainer

Success in the modern world requires more than just technical excellence.  The modern-day science career depends on the abilities to explain and to convince others in compelling and exciting ways that everybody can understand. Beginning with Carl Sagan, the great astrophysicist explainer of the 80s, and continuing all the way through to modern practitioners such as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the prize has always gone to those scientists who can tell a story. Dr. Leslie Gruis is an internationally published, award-winning author in the area of data privacy and its associated science, and is a noted popularizer of complicated ideas in ways that are both clear to the public and true to the underlying science. Join her at this session for some insider secrets on how to be the science explainer, science promoter, and science popularizer that everybody wants. 
 
The Accuracy of Misrepresentation: Illustrating Science for the Sake of Knowledge

In the annals of natural history, the descriptions and depictions of animal forms often leaves the contemporary reader puzzled. Often, the great artists and naturalists, ranging from Gesner to Aldrovandi to Dürer have given posterity iconic images that claim precision and accuracy, yet are hardly “truthful” to nature. No doubt, the cause of the confusion is that very few of the artist/naturalists ever actually saw the animals that they are depicting.  Dürer, for example, seems to have drawn his famous rhinoceros from written accounts and yet his illustration still stands as perhaps the most famous image of that animal in Western culture. The charm of these animal illustrations seems to have be that they meet expectations of what that “kind” of animal should look like, but with an added frisson of novelty that helped make it unique. Yet even the ostensible inaccuracies in these images are critical to a contextual understanding of the creature being pictured. Thus even the historical images that may amuse us—and perhaps even amused original viewers—are replete with the kind of knowledge and understanding that make the images impactful.  These representations, whether separated by time or subject or geography, are part of a process that Svetlana Alpers calls “picturing,” which is the ongoing practice of depicting an object, a person, a thing, or an animal within the conventions and constraints of contemporary ideologies.  But they also exist to mediate a sense of what unfamiliar animals may be like, suggesting a breadth of possibilities in nature.

Meta-research of Computing Publications on Ethics

Ethics in STEM is critical to the progress and improved virtue of humanity. Rapid advances in data-driven approaches and artificial intelligence applications place at the forefront the need for training in ethics of future computer science leaders. To understand how ethical issues are evolving in computing research in general, and in computer science education research, in particular, a detailed meta-research of computing literature was conducted using state-of-the art text mining. Dynamic topic modeling of abstracts published in the last several decades revealed growing interest of the computing community in ethical issues in cybersecurity and data science as well as in curricular improvements. Detailed analysis of educational trends shows that although publications on ethics are increasing, few focus on the pedagogy of teaching ethics. Additionally, there is a need for better training in ethics for healthcare informatics, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. These topics were discerned from the broader computing literature, but they were not found in education publications. Given the social responsibilities of researchers and educators to effectively communicate the ethical implications of technological advancements, the findings of this research provide actionable insights for improving ethics training in STEM education. The proposed automated literature mining approach was validated manually and can be deployed to discover topics and trends from publications at a large scale.

Debate and discussion about the responsibilities of scientists to society have evolved to a crescendo during the COVID-19 pandemic, but until recently we had limited empirically based information about what scientists themselves thought are their responsibilities. Through an ambitious global survey on the perspectives of scientists and engineers as to their responsibilities – in research, development, communication, instruction and so on – we start to glean areas of consensus and remaining areas of contention.