About

Andrew Brightman is a Professor of Engineering Practice in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. His role involves applying engineering principles to biomedical problems, contributing to the education and training of students in this interdisciplinary field. His work supports the integration of engineering practice within biomedical engineering, emphasizing practical applications and industry readiness.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Engineering ethics
• Materials science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Data science
• Public relations
• Pedagogy
• Nanotechnology

Selected publications

• How do Engineers Experience Ethics in Practice?: A Phenomenographic Investigation of Engineers in the Health Products Industry

  Science and Engineering Ethics · 2026-04-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Ethics is an essential aspect of professional development in engineering and required for accreditation in engineering programs. Educators need to understand how engineers experience ethics in their engineering practice to align ethics education with work experiences. We addressed the research question, “What are the qualitatively different ways engineers experience ethical engineering practice in the health products industry?” We used phenomenography to collect and analyze 43 interviews with practicing engineers working in orthopedics, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. This methodology assumes (1) there are qualitatively different ways of experiencing a phenomenon (ethical engineering practice) and (2) ways of experiencing are structurally related. This research identified six categories of ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice: Doing Right, Ensuring Integrity in Processes, Upholding Professional Responsibility, Understanding and Reconciling Perspectives, Negotiating and Using Judgment, and Stewarding Culture. The structural relationships among the categories were comprised of two dimensions of variation: Understanding the System and Understanding Role and Responsibility. The findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of the varied ways to experience ethical engineering in industry practice and thus have potential to inform ethics education in engineering programs and in workforce training.

  PublisherDOI

• BOARD # 404: NSF ER2 Project: Exploring the Variation in Understanding and Experiences with Ethical Engineering Research among Faculty in Biomedical Engineering

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Critical Incidents in Ethical Engineering Research: Stories from Biomedical Engineering Faculty

  2025-06-06

  articleSenior author

  We address the research question, “What critical factors influence ways of experiencing and understanding ethical engineering research by faculty members in biomedical engineering?” We address this question by using CIT or Critical Incident Technique. Through semi-structured interviews with 25 faculty members who conduct research in biomedical engineering, we extracted critical incidents and sorted these into 14 incident types that describe events that inform how these researchers come to understand and practice ethical engineering research. The incident types denote the formative impacts of professional culture and academic norms, engaging in ethical behaviors, attending to novel perspectives, formal and informal training and mentoring events, and reflecting on one's own views and experiences. Study findings can inform others' efforts at promoting ethical engineering research in their courses, curriculums, research labs, organizations, and throughout the field of biomedical engineering.

  PublisherDOI

• An Engineering Faculty and an Intention to Make Change for Diversity and Inclusion: Creating Sustainable Change Efforts

  2024-02-13 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Scholars of engineering education have acknowledged a need for greater connection between research and engineering teaching practice in order to see sustainable change in engineering schools.This study examines the contrast between STEM education research on the positive impact of faculty on diversity and inclusion and some engineering faculty's lack of actual involvement with these issues.We examine the

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Diversity and Inclusion within the Context of the Professional Formation of Engineers: Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Increased Attention on Racial Disparities

  2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2024-02-20

  articleOpen access

  Abstract In our NSF RFE sponsored research project, we have been investigating the intersection of three goals in engineering education: professional formation of students, an integrated sociotechnical perception of engineering, and increased diversity and inclusion. We approached this investigation into possible social change with design thinking. We engaged with faculty, staff, and students in a collaborative design process as part of a comparative study of two engineering departments – the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering (BME) – at Purdue University. Our project has been organized around the three phases of the design process (inspiration, ideation, and implementation), and embedded within the design process is a longitudinal, multiphase, mixed-methods study. During this third phase of the project, implementation, we have been both challenged and enabled by events and shifting conversations around the viral pandemic of disease and the widespread activism around racial injustice. In this paper, we provide an overview of the larger project's previous analyses of the surveys and interview data from faculty, staff, administrators, students, and alumni in both ECE and BME which we have conducted. These analyses will provide insight on the indirect and/or longer-term impact on the school's cultures and on aspects that are more embedded in the schools and disciplines, as well as those that are more amenable to change. In addition, we describe how design processes and mindsets have and can be used to address complex issues in engineering education, and how this approach facilitated the working groups/committees that emerged in both BME and ECE as part of this project. We also describe the data we are collecting in the final year of the project to understand the impacts of this project, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attention to racial disparities on our research questions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Individual and collective dimensions of ethical decision-making in engineering

  2024-11-25 · 3 citations

  book-chapter

  Complex relationships in ethical decision-making (EDM) between individuals and collectives form a cornerstone of ethical engineering practice. Engineering is shaped by and shapes the communities, cultures, and wider societies in which engineers belong and work. Yet the collective dimensions of these interactions have largely been ignored in engineering ethics education (EEE), mirroring the historic lack of attention to wider macro-ethics issues. This chapter articulates the importance of considering the interactions between individuals and collectives as a fundamental aspect of engineers’ EDM competency. Specifically, it introduces theoretical and practical aspects of the relationships between individuals and collectives in engineering practice, identifies key concepts in individual and collective EDM, describes current approaches to individual and collective dimensions of EDM in EEE, and presents an engineering case study that illustrates individual and collective dimensions of EDM. The chapter argues that the failure to adequately address the interactions between individuals and collectives in EDM has led to shortcomings in EEE. By making clear the complicated interplay between individuals and the diverse communities with which they are in relation, we can better understand and effectively cultivate competency in EDM and ethical practice.

  PublisherDOI

• What do Biomedical Engineering Faculty Talk About When They Talk About Ethics?

  2023-10-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Faculty members are stewards of academic engineering cultures and drivers of the ethical formation of our future engineers. To develop better ethics training tools we need to understand the diversity of faculty experiences and perceptions of ethics. In this study, we seek to unpack the experiences biomedical engineering faculty members have related to ethics in engineering research. We address the research question, “What are the features of research experiences that biomedical engineering faculty members discuss in the context of ethics in engineering research?” Sixteen biomedical engineering faculty members participated in this study. Faculty participants varied with respect to type of faculty position (tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure track), rank, gender, race/ethnicity, and geographic location. We utilized content analysis of semi-structured interviews to characterize the experiences these faculty members discussed. This analysis involved iterative cycles of open and axial coding to identify relevant categories and their constituent elements Faculty members described experiences that differed in context (physical setting, research phase, their current academic rank, their role in the experience), ethical topic area, ethical challenge, and characterization of ethical action. These findings will enable us to better consider how extant approaches to developing ethical engineering researchers in biomedical engineering align with the experiences of current biomedical engineering faculty members.

  PublisherDOI

• Approaches to Address New ABET Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria in Biomedical Engineering Curricula

  Biomedical Engineering Education · 2023-06-15 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The lack of diversity in engineering is a persistent problem with few signs of pending improvement. Efforts to promote diversity in engineering schools have produced modest gains. Based on a commitment to be a change leader and fueled by recent updates in ABET criteria to include diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEI-J) as tenets of engineering education, the biomedical engineering (BME) community needs to find new ways to address the issues of DEI for all groups in our curricula. In an attempt to redesign engineering departments to be more inclusive of all student populations, institutions of higher learning are reviewing programs, policies, and the ways they engage students. This paper provides BME programs with some thinking about the integration of DEI into areas of curriculum, assessment, faculty practice and faculty support, infrastructure, and climate for change. This study reports on curricular innovations attempted to date in order to serve as a resource for biomedical undergraduate engineering curricula. The authors have collected critical resources and literature related to integrating DEI into courses and content as well as assessment and evaluation approaches. Sections include resources for BME design, diverse anatomy and physiology, person-centered language, ethics, and assessment and evaluation approaches to measuring climate, faculty, and student impacts. In addition to providing resources, we propose that the ABET DEI framework is missing a critical component: justice. We feel that justice should be emphasized, particularly in biomedical engineering programs because our field has the unique opportunity to promote awareness of injustices and racial disparities in the design, development, and delivery of healthcare and medical technologies. While this paper presents examples of integration in several course types and across different topics, it is intended to inspire additional efforts by the BME community to make more concerted changes to promote DEI in our educational programs. Graphical abstract Graphical abstract demonstrating main themes and connections between different themes in the DEI-J framework presented in the paper. Created with BioRender.com.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Erratum to “BME 2.0: Engineering the Future of Medicine”

  BME Frontiers · 2023-01-01

  erratumOpen access

  [This corrects the article DOI: 10.34133/bmef.0001.].

  PublisherDOI

• BME 2.0: Engineering the Future of Medicine

  BME Frontiers · 2022 · 17 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Engineering ethics

  If the 20th century was the age of mapping and controlling the external world, the 21st century is the biomedical age of mapping and controlling the biological internal world. The biomedical age is bringing new technological breakthroughs for sensing and controlling human biomolecules, cells, tissues, and organs, which underpin new frontiers in the biomedical discovery, data, biomanufacturing, and translational sciences. This article reviews what we believe will be the next wave of biomedical engineering (BME) education in support of the biomedical age, what we have termed BME 2.0. BME 2.0 was announced on October 12 2017 at BMES 49 (https://www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/news/miller-opens-2017-bmes-annual-meeting-with-vision-for-new-bme-era/). We present several principles upon which we believe the BME 2.0 curriculum should be constructed, and from these principles, we describe what view as the foundations that form the next generations of curricula in support of the BME enterprise. The core principles of BME 2.0 education are (a) educate students bilingually, from day 1, in the languages of modern molecular biology and the analytical modeling of complex biological systems; (b) prepare every student to be a biomedical data scientist; (c) build a unique BME community for discovery and innovation via a vertically integrated and convergent learning environment spanning the university and hospital systems; (d) champion an educational culture of inclusive excellence; and (e) codify in the curriculum ongoing discoveries at the frontiers of the discipline, thus ensuring BME 2.0 as a launchpad for training the future leaders of the biotechnology marketplaces. We envision that the BME 2.0 education is the path for providing every student with the training to lead in this new era of engineering the future of medicine in the 21st century.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• SIRA Modules for Effectively Engaging Engineers in Ethical Reasoning About Emerging Technologies

  NSF · $300k · 2012–2016

• CCE STEM Standard: Understanding and Evaluating Ethical Engineering Practice

  NSF · $247k · 2017–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Carla Zoltowski

  Purdue University System

  169 shared

• Patrice M. Buzzanell

  University of South Florida

  103 shared

• Justin L. Hess

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  67 shared

• Memoria Matters

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  57 shared

• Michael C. Loui

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  56 shared

• Nicholas Fila

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  56 shared

• Alison Kerr

  Colorado School of Mines

  55 shared

• Dayoung Kim

  Virginia Tech

  54 shared