Keynote Speakers

Sarah R. Henke-Shafer is currently the capital-maintenance improvement programming manager at the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas.  She has been able to be a voice for infrastructure through innovative approaches to funding and planning, integrating technology to enhance efficiency to budget and schedule constraints.  Her infrastructure background is within land development, transportation planning, roadway construction, and emergency management technology.  Her vision is towards a resilient infrastructure network and bridging the gaps between technology, budget, and needs of communities. 

Laura Grossenbacher is Director of the Engineering Communications and Applied Ethics program in the College of Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison.   Her Ph.D. is from University of Texas in Austin, and she has been teaching ethics to undergraduate engineers since year 2000.  When the licensure requirements for Professional Engineers changed in year 2012 to include two hours of engineering ethics bi-annually, she began developing ethics workshops for PE’s across the state of Wisconsin and beyond.   She also teaches graduate courses in Engineering Ethics for the Master’s in Engineering Management program at UW-Madison.  She is an active member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, and her approach to ethics in the professions is to address it through practical cases situated in the work most relevant to her audiences.  She has written many profession and workplace-specific ethics cases, some of them are available through the Online Ethics Center.  Her approach to discussing ethics with audiences is to advocate for application of moral theory, reason, and empathy to carefully consider the impacts of engineering decisions on multiple stakeholders.