When Design World launched the Ethical Engineer column earlier this fall, we mentioned offering our readers a panel of engineering and ethics experts from across the spectrum of experience and engineering disciplines who will on occasion weigh in on real-world dilemmas and challenges.
Here we introduce two of our panelists and spotlight their backgrounds and what got them interested in engineering ethics in the first place. They bring with them not only real-world engineering experience but also a thoughtfulness and a genuine human understanding of engineering activity and its real-world consequences.
First up is Dr. Carlos Bertha. He earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa in 1989. After a five-year tenure with the Savannah District Corps of Engineers, he returned to USF to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy.
Carlos’ academic career took him to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he taught from 2000 until his retirement in 2024. His research centers on engineering ethics, with a particular emphasis on ethics pedagogy — exploring methods to teach ethics to engineering students effectively. He co-authored Engineering Ethics: Real World Case Studies (ASCE Press, 2017) with Drs. Steve Starrett and Amy Lara and has presented at numerous ASCE and academic conferences on topics such as case study methodology and the professional obligations of engineers.
In addition to his academic contributions, Carlos retired from the U.S. Army Reserve in 2019 as a Colonel. He served a combat tour with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Gardez, Afghanistan. He was an instructor for the Command and General Staff Officers Course, focusing on organizational leadership, joint doctrine, and professional ethics.
It was that deployment to Afghanistan that opened his eyes to the realities of the engineering work world and the ethical dilemmas that often arise in the course of that work. Specifically, in Afghanistan he was a manager of construction projects and saw firsthand some of the difficulties involved in that work. “It was a mess,” says Bertha, with corruption, unsafe conditions, and chain of command issues.
Ethics panel members Dr. Carlos Bertha and Alicia Lomas.
Our other panelist is Alicia Lomas. Alicia earned a degree in chemical engineering and is the founder and chief consultant of Lomas Manufacturing Consulting, LLC, where she advises food, biotech, and energy companies on automation, process safety, and digital transformation.
Her career spans aerospace, large-scale food manufacturing, and battery materials startups, where she has led the design and startup of multiple factories, growing teams of controls engineers, technicians, and panel fabricators along the way.
Alicia is also a keynote speaker and podcast host, known for her candid perspective on ethics, safety, and the realities of engineering culture. She is passionate about building safer, smarter factories while advocating for transparency, accountability, and inclusion in the engineering profession.
For Alicia, it was the move out of these more mature and established industries into the start-up space that really brought to light the ethical issues at the heart of the culture of “move fast and break things.”
“I came from industry and knew how things worked,” says Alicia, “so I had a lot of reservations and concerns about things they were doing.” Sentiments such as we need to “throw caution to the wind” and “we can’t afford to do safety” meant that they were “asked to do things that were just extremely unsafe,” noted Alicia. Often times, she found herself being the only adult in the room and having to go up against the bosses to do what was right and not the dangerous thing she was being told to do or ignore.
Alicia saw that too often, “at the end of the day, engineers are the only people in the room who understand the consequences” and so must be the ones to tell the truth about risk and safety, especially when it’s inconvenient or unpopular. Likewise, Carlos sees the role of engineering ethics as “learning how to resolve moral dilemmas that arise for engineers,” with every moral dilemma being about “a consequence, principles or rules, or one’s character or the kind of person we want to be.”
Look for future columns where our panelists weigh in on moral dilemmas encountered in the engineering workplace, bringing their knowledge and experience to bear on resolving issues in the most ethical way. We hope you’ll join us and share with us and them any issues that you’ve encountered as well.
Miles Budimir
Senior Editor
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking, NEWS • PROFILES • EDITORIALS
