News

Dr. Bahareh Abdi (EEE) Awarded Prestigious Comenius Senior Fellowship for AI Ethics Education Project

• Wednesday, 20 May 2026

Dr. Bahareh Abdi of the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) faculty has been awarded a Comenius Senior Fellowship by the Dutch National Education Institute (NKO), one of the most competitive education innovation grants in the Netherlands. With this award, Dr. Abdi becomes the first representative from the Electrical Engineering department to join the national ComeniusNetwork — a community of the country's leading educational innovators in higher education.

The fellowship comes with €100,000 in funding for a two-year project (September 2026 – August 2028), and was awarded from a national pool of just 22 grants across all Dutch universities and universities of applied sciences. To be eligible, applicants must have at least five years of teaching experience, and each faculty may nominate only one candidate per round — making the award a mark of exceptional recognition at both the departmental and national level.

About the Project

The funded project, "From Classroom to Reality: Integrative Data Science and AI Challenges for Real-World Ethical Practice," tackles a fundamental gap in how Data Science and AI are taught in higher education. Current curricula typically rely on clean, idealized datasets and treat ethics as a separate, abstract module — leaving graduates underprepared for the messy data, competing stakeholder interests, and ethical dilemmas they encounter in professional life.

Dr. Abdi's project addresses this head-on by developing an open repository of authentic, real-world AI challenges, co-created with companies, NGOs, and public-sector partners across domains including healthcare, finance, mobility, and sustainability. Rather than teaching ethics in isolation, each case study embeds ethical decision points directly into the technical workflow — a method known as "ethical micro-insertion" — so that responsible reasoning becomes a natural part of engineering practice.

What the Project Will Deliver

By the end of the two-year project, the team aims to produce:

• An open repository of real-world AI challenges with realistic datasets, technical tasks, and integrated ethical dilemmas
• Interactive student resources including Jupyter/Colab notebooks, reflection templates, and decision-based scenarios
• A national peer-learning ecosystem connecting students and educators through existing platforms (GitHub, Kaggle, Discourse) for code sharing, benchmarking, and ethical debate
• An instructor toolkit with rubrics, assessment guides, and practical integration advice for easy adoption across institutions
• All materials published openly under Creative Commons licensing via TU Delft's Open Education Programme

The Team

The project is led by Dr. Abdi alongside co-lead Dr. Martin Sand (Philosophy, TPM), and draws on an interdisciplinary team of TU Delft educators and researchers with expertise spanning machine learning, data science, engineering ethics, educational research, and curriculum design. Industry and societal partners — connected through Mondai House of AI — contribute real-world problem contexts and datasets. An external advisory board from institutions including WUR, UT, and RUG ensures broad relevance and quality assurance.

Broader Impact

The project builds directly on a pilot funded by the TU Delft AI Initiative, which demonstrated strong student engagement with case-based AI learning. The Comenius grant now enables structured development, educational validation, and national rollout — transforming that proof of concept into a robust, evidence-informed resource for Dutch higher education and beyond.

As a Comenius Fellow, Dr. Abdi will also join the national ComeniusNetwork, connecting with educational innovators across the Netherlands to share knowledge and amplify the impact of the work at a systemic level. This marks the first time an educator from TU Delft's Electrical Engineering department has earned a place in this network, reflecting the department's growing leadership in innovative, responsible, and inclusive engineering education.