2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Cognitive Empathy Enhances Communication and Entrepreneurship Fundamentals for Engineers
This work in progress paper describes a fundamental component that we have built into the training for scientists and engineers at a recently launched research institution in bioengineering. Cognitive empathy describes the practice of tuning into other people’s circumstances, abilities, desires, and needs, and it lives at the heart of the communication and design thinking work that we do with our incoming researchers. We base this effort on observation of what’s been consistently lacking or underdeveloped in science and engineering training and on the idea that we need to train comprehensively for what we want to be successful in. By structuring our training with empathy and listening at its core, we are able to derive greater value from each phase of the design thinking process – particularly in feedback – as applied to both research outcomes and communication efforts.
Our program encourages three phases for cognitive empathy. The first is listening deeply. We practice this as a mindset and build it in across our teaching so that it becomes a default skill for many of our trainees. It’s also a reciprocal skill – students who are focused on listening give better feedback to their peers and set a higher bar for professional interactions. Second, we ask trainees to develop empathy-informed goals. We ask frequently what students are trying to accomplish with their work and have used research from science communication scholars to build a framework of possible goals for communicating and developing their research. Finally, we encourage trainees to focus on trust building as a broader idea in research practice and communication, and that trust building is reinforced by the active and deep listening of cognitive empathy.
As we go forward from our current focus on Ph.D. and Post Doctoral fellows, we plan to expand this framework to Master’s-level trainings and in the future to an undergraduate engineering program. We would also like to share our insights from the program in future workshops with other innovation and entrepreneurship focused engineering programs.
This work is based on research done by John Besley and Anthony Dudo as described in their book Strategic Science Communication (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2022). It’s also framed by design-thinking practice described by the firm IDEO.