 Jonathan Beever
is an engineering ethicist and environmental
philosopher focused on questions of
values, relations, and digital
technologies.
He is Professor and Chair o the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia since August 2026.
Previously, he was Professor of Philosophy in the Department of
Philosophy and the Texts &
Technology Ph.D. Program at the
University of Central Florida, where he had been since 2015. He
completed postdoctoral appointments at
both The Rock Ethics Institute at Penn
State University and the Weldon School
of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue
University after taking his Ph.D. from
Purdue's Department of Philosophy.
Beever co-founded and directed the UCF
Center for Ethics, the UCF Theoretical
and Applied Ethics Graduate
Certificate Program, the undergraduate certificate program in AI, Big Data, and Human Impacts.
Beever's research is focused
broadly on the concept of ecological
ethics, or the moral relationships
among human and nonhuman animals, technologies, and environments. He seeks to understand and
impact the ways in which we all relate
to and value ecological relationships, including at the intersections of digital and
"analog" environments. He leads the Sound, Silence, and Environments lab which studies the impact of anthrophonic noise on the natural environment in and around our local environments.
His work in ethics and science has been supported by the National Science Foundation and by Meta. He is currently Co-Investigator (Co-I) as ethics lead on a large project, VERA, to build infrastructure to improve XR (virtual, mixed and augmented reality) research. Additionally, he is co-PI of a Meta-funded project on neuromotor ethics, looking to advance prosthetic limb take-up by patients in need.
He was Primary Investigator (PI) of an institutional transformation grant from the National Science Foundation (2020-2026), which studied the intersections of individual value foundations and institutional ethics frameworks in the process of STEM enculturation, and Co-PI on a multiinstitutional award to develop AI ethics modules for computer science curricula.
At UCF, he co-organized Ethically
Speaking, an ethics lecture
series hosted by the UCF Center for
Ethics, and he previously co-founded
the Purdue Lectures in Ethics,
Policy, and Science, a seminar
series in bioethics at Purdue
University (www.purdue.edu/bioethics, and
the Research Ethics Lecture Series at
Penn State University (http://rockethics.psu.edu/events/event-collections/research-ethics-series).
Beever has held fellowships with the
Kaufmann Foundation in
entrepreneurship, the Aldo Leopold
Foundation in conservation ethics, and
the Global Sustainable Soundscape
Network in the ethics of soundscape
ecology, among others.
Beever
has published on a wide range of
interrelated topics including digital
and environment ethics, ethics
education and pedagogy, biosemiotics,
and philosophical questions around
simulation.
At the national level, Beever serves
on the Board of Directors for the
International Association for
Environmental Philosophy
(IAEP), as Board Member and Chair-Elect for the
Association of Practical and
Professional Ethics (APPE), as a
member of the Ethics Board of the
American Society for Engineering
Education (ASEE), and as an Co-Director of the Online Ethics
Center (OEC) housed at UVa.
You can learn more about his
book-length projects here:
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