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Chemical Engineers’ Experiences of Ethics in the Health Products Industry

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Business and Professional Literacy Within Chemical Engineering

Tagged Division

Chemical Engineering

Page Count

21

DOI

10.18260/1-2--36793

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/36793

Download Count

1375

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Paper Authors

biography

Dayoung Kim Purdue University at West Lafayette

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Dayoung Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue University. Her current research interest centers on engineering ethics and social responsibility, and she is specifically interested in cultural influences on engineers’ moral formation. She earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) in 2017 and M.S. in Chemical Engineering at Purdue University (West Lafayette, USA) in 2021.

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biography

Alison J. Kerr University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

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Alison Kerr received a doctoral degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from The University of Tulsa. Her research interests include training development and evaluation as explored across a variety of academic disciplines and organizational settings. She is currently assisting on a number of training projects aimed at developing engineering students on relevant non-technical professional skills including ethical practice and presentation.

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Abstract

While ethics education for chemical engineers has been emphasized, potential misalignment between the content of current ethics education and engineers’ actual practice has been pointed out. To help improve ethics education for chemical engineers, this research-to-practice paper presents six descriptions of engineers’ experiences related to ethics. The descriptions were constructed based on in-depth interviews with six chemical engineers who are currently working in the health products industry. As the descriptions provide evidence that ethics is pervasive in chemical engineers’ daily practices, we argue that chemical engineering curriculum should include instruction relative to professional ethics in actual practice. This paper concludes with a discussion on potential ways to utilize these descriptions in ethics education.

Kim, D., & Kerr, A. J. (2021, July), Chemical Engineers’ Experiences of Ethics in the Health Products Industry Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--36793

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