Building Character: How Duke Engineers Learn to Lead with Purpose

While Duke engineers work every day to solve problems with real-world impact in classrooms and labs alike, a traditional engineering curriculum doesn’t always address what it takes to be a responsible innovator. 

Enter the Character Forward Initiative created to help integrate ethics into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Rich Eva joined Duke Engineering in 2024 to direct the effort.

“Character Forward exists to make good on the promise that’s core to Duke’s and Pratt’s mission—to form people of character who make an impact on their communities,” Eva shared.

Eva specializes in ethics, pedagogy and political philosophy. His experience as a D1 athlete during his undergraduate career sparked his interest in leadership and character development. Before joining Duke, he worked in finance to help organize pro bono service initiatives before returning to academia to investigate questions in applied ethics.

“Ethics isn’t just about figuring out what’s right and wrong—it’s about figuring out how to live a good life,” said Eva. “What helps us do that are character traits or virtues.”

Meet Retired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.

As of July 2025, Eva’s team to tackle character education at Duke Engineering gained a distinguished member. 

Retired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., formerly the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, has joined Duke University for a two-year appointment as executive-in-residence with both the Pratt School of Engineering and the Sanford School of Public Policy.

“Gen. Brown’s wealth of experience as an engineer who has devoted his professional life to national service will inspire our students,” shared Dean Jerome P. Lynch at the time of Gen. Brown’s appointment. “But it will be his experiences as a high-ranking officer in the Air Force that will provide our students with a unique education in the power of technology in advancing the common good, including our national security.”

In his new role, Brown will collaborate with engineering faculty to integrate ethics and character formation into technical education while guest lecturing and engaging with the school’s research community.

Eva notes that Brown’s focus on leadership, character and integrity aligns closely with Duke Engineering’s broader vision for the decade ahead. 

“The 2020s are going to be the decade of character formation in engineering,” said Eva. “Duke is going to be at the forefront of that shift.”

Where Reflection Meets Rigor

Developing empathy and ethical awareness in engineering courses is a relatively new endeavor. 

“Most engineers over 40 have no ethics education at all,” Eva shared. 

Since joining Duke, Eva has led workshops for engineering faculty on integrating character education into their courses. Most participants indicated that they had no introduction to ethics in their undergraduate education and questioned how to balance this work with the already rigorous and demanding course load that faces their students.

“When faculty hear ‘ethics,’ they think I’m going to make them erase half their engineering content. I tell them, no—I want to help you do what you’re already doing, but better,” Eva shared. 

For Eva, the truth is that faculty are already forming students’ character in class, whether they mean to or not.

“Every professor, even if they teach math, wants their students to become certain kinds of people. It’s not about replacing equations with ethics—it’s about bringing what’s implicit to the surface,” Eva said. “I just want them to become aware of that and own it.”

The primary method for compelling students to invest in their own character education while tackling class projects is prompting intentional reflection. 

“One of the best ways to cultivate character is reflection—asking, ‘Am I courageous? Why or why not? What’s stopping me?’” Eva said. 

Biomedical engineering faculty member Cameron Kim is among the first at Pratt to implement this kind of curricular integration. 

“One of the key factors when it comes to being an engineer is our ability, or our dedication, to the public welfare and to public service,” Kim said. “Nothing that we do occurs in any sort of societal or ethical vacuum.”

Kim admits that both students and faculty often struggle to find time for reflection. To address this, he builds reflection prompts into his lessons so that students can track their own growth in curiosity and humility—though it doesn’t always come easily.

“Humility requires an acknowledgement of what we do know and don’t know as people,” said Kim. “It’s okay to not know everything. That’s a challenge not just for Duke students, but for everybody.”

Siobhan Oca, an assistant professor of the practice in Duke’s Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, emphasizes giving students opportunities to understand the broader impact of their problem-solving.  

“Character, for me, is about recognizing who you are and who you want to be,” Oca shared. “It’s still about recognizing the impacts you can have, but also how you develop yourself in the way that you want to develop.”

For Oca, one of the most important elements is facilitating authentic and engaged conversations where students from across different cultures can learn about each other’s perspectives and learn to disagree respectfully. To create dedicated space for this, Oca developed a separate ethics course, which is required for all students in Duke’s robotics programs.

“Some might argue that it isn’t the best use of time, but I think it is, because it helps students connect their technical work with ethical reasoning,” shared Oca. “The more ethics looks and feels like the rest of their engineering work, the more seriously students take it.”

How does character training measure up when it comes to making quantitative assessments of students’ progress? 

“One of the challenges that we have with character education is that it’s actually really difficult to measure,” said Kim. “And if all we’re doing is in service to a percentage point, then I think that we’ve got some reflection of our own to do.”

In Oca’s ethics course, one of the most valuable practices is having students complete their own self-assessment by taking a pre- and post-survey based on specific virtues that are both formative and evaluative, so that she and her students can see how their perspectives shift over the course of the semester.

“I think the most important thing is just having the conversation,” Oca added.

One of the newest Character Forward offerings to help promote those conversations is the inaugural Character Forward Fellows program, which invites Pratt undergraduate students to explore the ethical dimensions of engineering through a focused spring-semester learning community. 

Character Forward Fellows will enroll in EGR 190: Ethics and Technology and participate in a Character Formation cohort, a series of four 90-minute sessions held throughout the spring semester. These sessions bring together students, faculty, alumni and industry professionals to cultivate the virtues of wisdom, justice, discipline and courage—traits essential for ethical leadership in engineering. All fellows will receive a $1,000 fellowship award.

“Our goal isn’t to add one more requirement,” Eva said. “It’s to make the kind of formation that’s already happening intentional, reflective and lifelong.”

Character Forward is also developing high-touch departmental courses and senior capstone opportunities, with plans to integrate into advising and orientation in the coming years. 

“Whether or not you think you’re forming the character of your students—you are,” Eva said. “Why not do it well and with intentionality?”

Connecting to The Purpose Project

Character Forward is a partnership between Pratt and The Purpose Project at Duke, which is a collaboration between the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity School and the Office of the Provost, funded by The Duke Endowment.

Through curricular and co-curricular programs, The Purpose Project invites students into learning communities that cultivate habits of heart, mind and action, helping them flourish during and beyond their time at Duke. By foregrounding ethical and existential concerns, The Purpose Project provides students opportunities to reflect on their lives in intellectually challenging and rewarding ways. 

“By definition, a lot of what we’re doing is inviting perspectives…to come into dialogue and often conflict with one another,” said Christian Ferney, associate director for education, operations & media strategy with the Kenan Institute for Ethics. “It’s through that collision of different ideas that students and faculty cultivate a sense of humility.”

Katherine Jo, director of program development and design at The Purpose Project, added that high-achieving Duke students arrive to campus already experiencing certain pressures to value their life progress in certain ways—like graduating with a high-status job or getting into the best graduate program.

“It’s not really their fault,” Jo shared. “They’ve been through lots of schooling where this has been placed before them as the right kind of life… and it creates a lot of anxiety and stress in students’ lives.” 

To help students reframe their personal and educational path at Duke, The Purpose Project works with initiatives like Character Forward to shift undergraduates into a more productive and reflective space.

“Getting students to shift their mindset toward considering what’s the good or the need of others that I can contribute to—that’s already thinking in terms different from individual achievement,” Jo added.

“Having somebody in the department who brings this perspective day in and day out, and can work with faculty to cultivate those sensibilities…that’s how institutional change happens,” said Ferney. 

To learn more about how Duke Engineering is leading the way in character and ethics education, catch the full interview with Rich Eva and Retired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. below.