Our mission
Embedded Ethics is a collaboration between the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and the Computer Science Department, all at Stanford. The program began in Fall 2020 with core introductory undergraduate computer science classes, then expanded to upper level computer science classes. The program embeds ethics into class lectures, homework, and assessments, with a focus on ensuring that the ethics curriculum makes meaningful contact with the technical content of courses. This signals to students that recognizing ethical issues is central to studying computer science and builds toward the program’s goal of making reflection about the ethical implications of technology a core part of software and product development. This makes exposure to ethics integral to the core CS courses for the thousands of undergraduates who take them each year.
The faculty leads of the Embedded Ethics program are Rob Reich (Ethics Center, Political Science) and Mehran Sahami (CS). The program is directed through the Ethics Center by Anne Newman. The Embedded Ethics Fellows are part of the broader cohort of postdoctoral fellows at the Ethics Center. The Embedded Ethics Fellows work in the core CS classes to develop and deliver ethics lectures and to add ethics content to homework assignments and assessments. The program is highly tailored to the technical content of each class so that students encounter ethics in a way that meaningfully connects it to the CS topics at hand.
Our team
Faculty and Staff
Rob Reich (Ethics Center, Political Science)
Mehran Sahami (Computer Science)
Anne Newman (Ethics Center)
Alexandra Cambra (Ethics Center)
Postdoctoral Fellows
Jennifer Chien (current)
Justin Shin (current)
Wanheng Hu (current)
Veronica Rivera (2023-2025)
Dan Webber (2023-2025)
Benji Xie (2022-2024)
Diana Acosta Navas (2021-2023)
Kathleen Creel (2020-2022)
Graduate Research Assistants
Jenny Yang (current)
Julia Kwak (2024-2025)
Technology Ethics and Policy Rising Scholars
Louie Ortiz (current)
Makenzy Caldwell (2023-2024)
Course Assistants/Staff
Nick Bowman, Brynne Hurst, Golrokh Emami, Skanda Vaidyanath, Lauren Gillespie, Neel Kishnani, Tim Gianitsos, Xiyu Zhang, Ha Tran, Ece Korkmaz, Golrokh Emami, Emily Wen, Daniel Guillen, Derek McCreight, Juliette Woodrow, Chase Davis, Zheng Lian, Neel Kishnani, Elyse Cornwall, Kate Rydberg, Erin McCoy, Ella Tessier-Lavigne, Kara Eng, Trip Master, Eunji Lee, Jasmine Rodriguez, Laura Bauman, Lucía Morris, Anjali Ragupathi, Isik Senem, Allison Jia, Jeong Shin, Max Kanwal, Prerit Choudhary, Zachary Witzel, Ellie Vela
Research Assistants
Ananya Karthik, Neha Chetry, Julia Jorgensen, Grant Ray, Erin McCoy, Sarah McCarthy
Website Designer
Website Developer
Michael Chang