Dr. Janna Van Grunsven

Biography

Janna van Grunsven is an assistant professor focused on ethics, philosophy, and technology at TU Delft. She coordinates ethics and philosophy technology education at the university and is involved in the 4TU.CEE funded COMET project, exploring the nature of engineering ethics education. She joined TU Delft in 2017 after serving as a post-doctoral teaching fellow at the philosophy department of Fordham University in New York City from 2015 to 2017. Van Grunsven obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2015 and holds both a BA and an MA (Cum Laude) in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. A member of the steering committee for the Ethics Special Interest Group of the European Society for Engineering Education, she also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Technoethics. Her research background incorporates the fields of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition (4E cognition). Her current research interests include the relationship between 4E cognition and people’s ethical experiences, as well as how developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and robotics impact these experiences, particularly for individuals on the autism spectrum. She supervises a doctoral project that investigates empathy and autism in relation to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology and is part of the multi-university project 'The Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies' (ESDT). Van Grunsven contributes significantly to teaching ethics in engineering design and has co-authored various papers on topics surrounding responsible innovation and ethics in technology education.

Research Interests