Laura Grossenbacher is Director of Undergraduate Program Review and Director of the Technical Communication Program in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and has been teaching courses in engineering communication and ethics for over 20 years. Since 2012, she has developed ethics cases to use with a variety of different constituents, including engineers working for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, American Transmission Company, Madison Gas and Electric, WE Energies, Realtime Utility, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and the American Water Resources Administration; she has also taught ethics workshops for the Wisconsin Structural Engineering Code Refresher Annual Conference, the Wisconsin Concrete Pavement Association and the Wisconsin Society for Landscape Architects, among others.
Grossenbacher’s ethics workshops are designed to engage engineers in discussing and applying codes of ethics, moral theory and behavioral science to practical cases in different engineering disciplines. She has taught applied engineering ethics to over 4,500 engineers across the state of Wisconsin. Beyond her work with practicing engineers, she teaches online ethics courses for graduate students as well as an undergraduate ethics course designed for Geological Engineering students. She is a member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), the current co-chair of the Online Ethics Center Community of Practice in Teaching Engineering Ethics.
