National Science Foundation Grant

Dr. Kelly Smith

The Rutland Institute recently completed an application for a $5 million, 5 year National Science Foundation grant to produce a comprehensive website meeting all the ethics needs of professional scientists and engineers, across all disciplines and job areas (academic, industrial, government). The effort is being spearheaded by RIE fellows Kelly Smith and Julia Frugoli, with assistance from many others.

Indeed, this is such a huge undertaking that it was necessary to assemble a consortium of external partners including General Electric, Michelin, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Society of Professional Engineers, and many others. Internal partners include CU-ICAR and CCIT. The proposal aims not only to produce a high quality website, but actually to help foster the development of a distributed community of experts with a strong interest in ethics who will insure the site has a wide variety materials which constantly evolve to track the community's needs. The competition is said to include at least 17 other schools such as Duke, MIT and UC San Diego. NSF is expected to announce the winner in September. In the mean time, think good thoughts about our submission being selected. We will keep you posted!

Dr. Kelly C. Smith

Rutland Institute Fellow