Engineers are tasked with designing, developing, and building solutions to complex problems. By nature, their decisions can have critical consequences. Avoiding engineering mistakes requires not only technical knowledge but also the ability to rapidly assess whether a solution is feasible and appropriate.

Black Americans have a lineage of excellence in engineering that pre-dates our American chattel slavery, yet this legacy of ingenuity is suppressed within engineering education in the United States. Even as institutions and organizations within the engineering education community promote campaigns to take action against racism, the violence of whiteness remains unacknowledged.

This talk will focus on three core topics associated with responsible conduct of research: research misconduct, detrimental research practices, and authorship and peer review.

Textbooks often depict the research enterprise as occurring in a linear fashion. But when we actually conduct research, we find something very different happens. There are fits and starts and lots of soul searching. We have to find our way through an uncharted landscape. But all people see is the end product, when the research is explained in a tidy paper. What is it like to undergo the research journey?

In this annual address on the State of the School, it is customary for us to reflect on where we have come, where we are now, and where we are going. This extraordinary pandemic year – more accurately spanning 18 months and counting – has brought us challenge, change, uncertainty and adversity that reveal much to us about who we are.

An engineering workforce is essential for society to meet our current and future challenges. By understanding how students find their graduation majors in engineering, we can improve in-major retention and graduation rates so that students find their engineering graduation discipline quickly without having multiple major changes during their undergraduate studies.

The lived realities and systemic barriers Latinx engineering students often face have been silenced and replaced by stories of inadequacy and deficits. The current national discourse on anti-racism requires that we shift our attention to conversations that challenge those deficit perspectives. This type of engineering and research gatekeeping erases different ways of knowing, doing and being – a process de Sousa Santos describes as epistemological injustice.