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News Release

Last modified: Tuesday, November 2, 2010

IU ethics education expert to advise national center

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nov. 2, 2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Kenneth D. Pimple, director of Teaching Research Ethics programs at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University Bloomington, has been named to the Ethics Committee of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, a new ethics center funded through a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The new center, based at the University of Illinois, will include an online portal for professional and research ethics in science, mathematics and engineering. The online center will provide comprehensive access to ethics resources for teachers, students, researchers, administrators and other audiences. According to the center's director, C. K. Gunsalus, professor of business at the University of Illinois, the center's goal is "to create an online environment that encourages the life-long development of ethical practices through materials and interaction with other professionals."

Experts from across the country will advise the center through its Education, Ethics, Futures, Steering and Technical committees. Pimple, an internationally recognized expert on research ethics education, will help to evaluate existing materials for inclusion on the center's website and collaborate with experts to design new educational modules. A multidisciplinary research team will generate innovative curricular materials and create interactive tools to help scientists and engineers incorporate ethical issues and reasoning into their pedagogy, research and practice. The NSF grant also funds several other partner institutions and organizations around the country that will contribute content and expertise to the project.

The portal infrastructure will be physically located in the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois and will be built around the HUBZero e-learning and collaboration platform. The grant work will include the development of HUBZero tools and technologies.

About the Poynter Center

The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions is an endowed ethics research center at Indiana University Bloomington. The Poynter Center is dedicated to studying a broad range of ethical issues in American public life. Interdisciplinary in aim, the Poynter Center uses the full resources of Indiana University to initiate research and teaching across traditional academic boundaries. The center is supported in part by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at IU Bloomington. For more information, visit https://poynter.indiana.edu.

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