Professors Bradley and Golecki publish article on ethical capstone courses

Bioengineering is a field at the forefront of technological advancements, with innovations that are continually shaping the future of healthcare. However, with great innovation comes great responsibility: in a field that emphasizes both hard science and holistically meeting human needs, bioengineers are constantly navigating complex ethical considerations. 

Professors Joe Bradley and Holly Golecki are well aware of these critical scenarios, and received recognition for their work in this area when they were awarded for their presentation “Experiential Learning: Exploring Nuances when Making Ethical Decisions” at the most recent Biomedical Engineering Educating Community (BEEC) Conference. Their work has also been published in Biomedical Engineering Education, and can be viewed here.

Bradley and Golecki’s project was to design a capstone course curriculum that fully appreciated the complexities and professional importance of ethics in bioengineering. They achieved this goal with a case-based approach and a course framework that asks students to analyze cases from combined ethical and technical perspectives.

“Ethics isn't just about being a good person and therefore ethical,” said Bradley. “Ethical nuances come when there are many good, rational decisions that you can make, especially in a medical capacity, and you have to choose one. As engineers, we need a structured way to decide how we should be making those critical professional decisions.”

The advance of AI and other modern technologies has added extra complexity to the question of ethics in bioengineering, and Bradley and Golecki designed their course module to teach traditional ethics while also educating students on the potential for bias in modern technologies including AI, sensors, and devices.

“Our goal is to talk about the kinds of nuances that appear in bioengineering,” said Golecki. “For example, when you're using biometric data to develop solutions, you have to understand how people's biometric data might differ depending on their identity, and how that could impact design. When you see outliers in this kind of data, are those outliers representative of an entire population that you might be neglecting when you're designing purely based on statistics?”

Bradley and Golecki suggest that integrating ethical considerations into biomedical engineering capstone design courses can give future engineers the tools they need to innovate in a way that is not only transformative, but inclusive. Learning about ethics within engineering allows students to understand human-centered data in new ways, and increases their ethical decision-making abilities. Beyond that, it’s something that students are passionate about.

“We find that students are eager to put engineering within a social justice context, because our work as bioengineers has a significant human element,” Golecki said. “I’ve found that students appreciate the time to be able to think about and address these issues.”

Ethics-based capstone courses ultimately have the potential to benefit not only students, but the broader community that these students will soon be graduating into.

“We're really trying to push the envelope with what's happening in capstone courses and do things that are new and different,” said Bradley. “We want to provide a better kind of student experience that’s more relevant to what they might see in industry and in their careers. And hopefully it will lead to better, more ethical decisions, and a greater good to society.” 

Bradley and Golecki’s work can be read here.