Challenger Engineer Discusses Workplace Ethics

BLOOMINGTON, Ill — Roger Boisjoly will present lessons learned by using the powerful Challenger disaster as an example of organizational behavior, professional responsibility, and ethical decision-making in a lecture as part of Illinois Wesleyan University's May Term, "The Courage to Dare," on Wednesday, May 22, at 7 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium of The Ames Library.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Boisjoly is one of the principal engineers who was directly involved in the attempt to stop the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger prior to its destruction on January 28, 1986. As a result of his testimony to the Presidential Commission investigating the disaster, he was branded a "whistleblower" and was blackballed from the aerospace industry. Since then Boisjoly has started his own successful engineering consulting business, and also has given over 500 lectures, mostly to college students, about his personal experiences with Challenger.

For his honesty and integrity leading up to and directly following the shuttle disaster, Boisjoly was awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

For additional information, contact the IWU May Term office at 309/556-3751.