testing grounds, not the final site yet
I build things that move under someone else's command, canards that a flight computer steers and airframes that carry whatever the mission needs. Ethics for me is not abstract. It is the question of what my hardware makes possible and what it should refuse to do.
Lockheed Martin runs a national case competition where university teams analyze an engineering ethics case and defend their position in front of Lockheed engineers and executives at its headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. In February 2026 I was on Rice's team, coached by Dr. Van Kleeck and Dr. Webb through the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL). We spent about two months preparing the case before the trip.
What I learned: the case was an AI-enabled command-and-control system for critical infrastructure, and every round a coin flip decided whether I argued for autonomous threat response or for meaningful human control over every high-impact action. Having to win with both positions taught me that the ethical answer was never one-sided or simple, and that getting to it took risk-informed judgment about which trade-offs preserved mission assurance and which quietly eroded it. The real question was never speed versus safety. It was where accountability sits when the system is wrong, because an autonomous response with no one answerable for it is not a capability, it is a liability. It also taught me that stakeholders are not just the customer. They are also the operators who own the system in the field and the public it is meant to protect, and when the customer offered to relax requirements to hit a schedule, serving the customer meant telling them which requirements were there to protect those people. Most of all, I learned that preparation is what gives you the confidence to speak up. Ethical decisions are made under schedule pressure with senior people who want a different answer, and you only raise a concern and hold your position there if you have done the analysis beforehand. Ethics is a design input, not a review gate at the end.
assets/leadership/lm-team.jpgassets/leadership/lm-stage.jpgRCEL asked me to moderate this year's engineering ethics panel, "Ethical Decisions: The Engineer's Responsibility," on November 3, 2026, on the strength of the Lockheed competition. The panel puts practicing engineers and faculty in front of students to work through real ethical decisions from their careers. I write the question script, brief the panelists ahead of time, and run the room. [update after the panel: who sat on it, the questions that landed, what you took from moderating]
assets/leadership/ethics-panel-moderating.jpgethics-panel-wide.jpg).assets/leadership/ethics-panel-wide.jpg