STEER RESEARCH LAB

STEER Research Lab

The STEER (Securing Tomorrow through Engineering Education and Resilience) Research Lab focuses on engineering decision-making under uncertainty. Engineering education does an excellent job building analytical and technical foundations through structured problems, but real-world engineering rarely looks that way. In practice, engineers face ill-structured, high-stakes situations that require judgment, trade-offs, and reasoning under uncertainty, capabilities that become even more critical as AI increasingly shapes engineering work.

What do we do? STEER studies and develops risk‑informed and AI‑enabled decision‑support approaches to advance the development and application of professional judgment, helping engineers make sound, defensible decisions in high‑consequence socio‑technical systems.

How do we do it? STEER integrates two foundational research pillars:

1. Risk‑informed decision‑making in engineering practice. We investigate how engineers balance safety, performance, cost, and resources under time pressure and uncertainty. This work draws on probabilistic modeling, systems thinking, and AI‑supported decision tools to study decision‑making in complex socio‑technical systems.
2. Engineering education and professional formation. We examine how decision‑making skills and professional judgment can be developed earlier and more effectively in engineering curricula. This includes the design and evaluation of AI‑enabled and technology‑supported approaches for instruction and learning.

Why does this integration matter? STEER does not treat risk research and engineering education as separate efforts. Instead, education is the mechanism through which risk‑informed decision‑making can be cultivated, tested, and transferred to practice. Insights from industry contexts inform instructional design, while educational research reveals how engineers learn to reason and make decisions in ambiguous settings.

Through interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement with industry partners, STEER aligns how engineers are educated with how they must ultimately reason, decide, and lead in uncertain, AI‑mediated environments. This unified approach defines who we are, what we do, and why our work matters.