Dan Burkey, Castleman Term Professor of Engineering Innovation and associate dean for undergraduate education was recently awarded a $750K NSF grant through the IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) program. Together with UConn collaborators Monika Crowl, assistant professor-in-residence in chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Mike Young, Associate Professor Emeritus from the Neag School of Education, Burkey will lead this multi-institution grant with additional collaborators from the University of Pittsburgh and Rowan University.
This is a Tier II grant, and continues from previous Tier I funding to study novel ways of teaching and assessing engineering students’ ethical reasoning. The initial grant ran from 2020-2024.
“Engineering solutions touch so many aspects of peoples’ lives, often in ways that they don’t even realize,” says Burkey. “It’s important that, as students, future engineers are given opportunities to grapple with the difficult tradeoffs that all engineering solutions come with, so that they are better prepared to make critically informed decisions in the future.”