Webinar with Yannis Yortsos
Wednesday, February 19 at 15:00 UTC
The rapid engineering and technological advances, with their unprecedented rate of growth and their resulting increasing power, call for continuous and similarly unprecedented changes in engineering education and research. Engineering schools are at the center of enabling every other discipline, from the professions to the social sciences. And the increasing power of technology presents unprecedented opportunities to solve grand challenge-like problems (ranging from the NAE Grand Challenges to the UN Sustainable Development Goals). Electing to pursue such opportunities is an ethical mandate that should be heeded by engineering schools worldwide in their education and research.
In parallel, society will increasingly demand trust from institutes of higher education and research, including the development of trustworthy engineers. And while engineering schools currently excel in providing one of the two essential attributes of trust, namely competence, they must also endeavor to nurture engineering graduates with the other essential attribute, namely character, with its components of purpose and values.
This webinar will focus on these two rapidly emerging mandates, by focusing on programs, such as the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, and on curricula innovations that infuse elements of technology ethics and address the increasing intersection of technology, humanity and society.
Speaker//Dr. Yannis Yortsos
Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Zohrab Kaprielian Chair in Engineering
Yannis C. Yortsos is the Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Zohrab Kaprielian Chair in Engineering, a position he holds since 2005. Prior to that he served from 2001 to 2005 as Associate Dean and then as Sr. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Yortsos served as chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering and in 1995 he was appointed to the Chester Dolley Professorship.