2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering Faculty Members’ Experience of Professional Shame: Summary of Key Insights from 2025-2026 – NSF CAREER

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

In this paper, we present an overview of an NSF CAREER project (Award #[deidentified]) that seeks to advance the academic well-being of engineering faculty by identifying and investigating phenomena of professional shame experienced by faculty members. For this purpose, we partnered with six academic institutions and interviewed their engineering faculty. We present an overview of our data collection of non-standardized interviews with engineering faculty (n=23) and using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine individual cases (n=10) that illustrate poignant experiences of professional shame. In this paper, we summarize the key insights from our interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study on faculty members’ lived experience of professional shame. Additionally, we describe our next steps to integrate the processes of two qualitative studies so that we can analyze how these experiences of professional shame might relate to faculty members’ expectations of their students, peers, and their departments’ culture, and ultimately train departments to build cultures where faculty and students are able to live well with the experience of professional shame.

Authors

Fatima Anwar Omar University of Georgia [biography]

Fatima Anwar Omar is a Ph.D. student at the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) within the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA. Her research focuses on exploring the lived experiences of engineers in workplace and academic settings through social and cultural lenses. Fatima brings over 12 years of industry experience, having worked with various organizations in Dubai (UAE) and Pakistan.
Dr. James L. Huff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6693-5808 University of Georgia [biography]

Dr. James Huff is an Associate Professor within the Engineering Education Transformations Institute and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education, where he has held multiple leadership positions. Dr. Huff serves as a Deputy Editor with the Journal of Engineering Education and serves on the editorial boards for Personality and Social Psychology Review and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue, and his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Harding.

Dr. Huff is a qualitative researcher whose work lies at the interdisciplinary nexus of engineering education research and applied personality and social psychology. An NSF CAREER Awardee, he is committed to fostering care as a central mindset of engineering and other professions through his in-depth examinations of personal lived experiences of identity and emotion, facets often hidden within professional domains. As Principal Investigator of the Beyond Professional Identity lab, Dr. Huff has mentored undergraduates, doctoral students, and professionals from over seventeen disciplines in conducting their qualitative investigations on psychological phenomena relevant to equity and well-being in workplaces and degree programs.
Kyle Shanachilubwa The University of Georgia

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