The Ethos Center
The Ethos Center connects the passion and technical knowledge and skillset of engineering students, faculty, staff, and alumni with our community partner’s needs, assets, and aspirations. Through collaboration with our community partners, we provide transformative sociotechnical experiences and transdisciplinary curricula that integrates human rights, social justice and sustainability frameworks. Faculty, staff and students engage in applied research projects to design and develop appropriate technologies through international and domestic immersions as well as hands-on classroom projects that advance engineering for the common good.
The Ethos Center administers the “Human Rights in Engineering” minor for School of Engineering students. This minor requires 12 credit hours, including an immersive experience such as an Ethos immersion, breakout or an Ethos experiential learning course.
For undergraduate and graduate students, the Ethos Center’s experiential learning opportunities include the semester-long and 10 day (Breakout) Immersion programs (Domestic and International), Ethos R&D program (team-based, just and sustainable technologies research and development), and the Sociotechnical Engineering for the Common Good course, EGR 331 (project-based projects with Dayton community partners). Students earn academic credit for the Immersion programs by taking EGR 330 and for the Ethos R&D program by taking EGR 398.
The Ethos courses count as technical electives for most engineering disciplines and count for various CAP categories.