FlintFor young engineers, Flint offers a lesson on the importance of listening

Sheldon Masters, a former Virginia Tech Ph.D. student, says he used to think scientists and engineers should be like robots: “Emotionally unattached.”

But after attending a class entitled Engineering Ethics and the Public: Learning to Listen with dozens of other young engineers at his university, he found his perspective changed.

“After this work,” he said. “I realize feelings like empathy and guilt are enormous assets.”

Taught by Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor, and Yanna Lambrinidou, a medical ethnographer, the course enabled students to become active protagonists in one of the greatest drinking water emergencies in recent history.

Developed with support from a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, the course is intended to explore the relationship between engineering, science, and society, and to challenge young engineers to listen more carefully to the voices of the communities they serve.

Edwards has recent widespread name recognition due in part to his leadership role in the 2015 studies that uncovered high amounts of lead in the Flint, Michigan drinking water. That research received NSF support through a rapid response grant.

The recent Flint events unfolded even as Lambrinidou and Edwards taught a class designed to help prevent such occurrences in the future.

Contamination
The NSF notes that in the early 2000s, Edwards, an expert in water treatment and corrosion, uncovered elevated lead levels in the Washington, D.C., drinking water. He also published a study documenting a 37 percent rise in fetal deaths in the district during that same period.

These findings resulted in years of often-contentious debate between researchers and local, state and federal authorities. The experience deeply affected Edwards and his colleagues.

“At some point I realized the problem was the behavior of the people paid to protect us,” said Edwards. “It was such a betrayal of public trust that it really shook me to my core.”

In 2008, he and Lambrinidou, an adjunct assistant professor at Virginia Tech, decided to develop a graduate-level engineering ethics course to help guide future engineers in critical decisions that affect the public good.

“What happened in D.C. and now is happening in Flint got us thinking about how we as a society are training engineers and scientists to employ their professional power in ways that will affect many, many people,” Lambrinidou said. The D.C. case eventually led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revise its lead regulations.

One key element of the course is a seemingly simple act: listening. The professors teach