For more than 20 years, accreditation requirements have called on engineering programs to incorporate ethics education in their curricula and demonstrate the outcomes such education is achieving in graduates. In the current articulation, ABET 1 student outcome criterion 3.4 calls for “An ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts” (ABET). Engineering educators are attempting to achieve this outcome using a variety of approaches. Among those educators are current and emerging leaders in ethics and engineering, representing a range of engineering disciplines, teaching levels, and institutions, who participated as members of 16 interdisciplinary research teams in a 2017 National Academy of Engineering (NAE) workshop on Overcoming Challenges to Infusing Ethics into the Development of Engineers. At the workshop the team members shared their work, discussed strategies for overcoming institutional and cultural challenges, and laid out plans for advancing efforts to infuse ethics into the development of engineers. This special issue of Advances in Engineering Education highlights the further development and outcomes of 7 of the 16 original projects, as reported in research papers that explain whether and how their activities have progressed in overcoming challenges to infusing ethics into the development of engineers. This editorial frames the seven projects in the context of both the 2017 workshop and a 2019 NAE workshop designed for STEM faculty new to teaching ethics, and highlights the importance of continued work in ethics education.
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