What do civil engineers and Spider-Man have in common?
“A lot,” maintains Grace Pepperman, a 2025 graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, and second-place winner of the ASCE Daniel W. Mead Prize for her paper on professional ethics.
“Both occupy positions of public trust and, therefore, are duty bound to use all their powers to safeguard the wellbeing of society,” wrote Pepperman in her winning essay.
“We are essentially ‘everyman heroes’—regular individuals who act with integrity and courage in prioritizing the needs of others. In the words of Spider-Man: ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’”
2025 contest participants were asked to write about the role civil engineers should play in the prevention of and response to an infrastructure disaster from an ethical perspective.
Pepperman argues that knowledge gleaned from past failures should inform efforts to avert infrastructure disasters. As an example, she cites the I-95 collapse in Philadelphia, attributing it, in part, to uninsulated steel—the result of weak regulation and cost-cutting.
Her essay was first written for the environmental engineering senior capstone course, taught by Professor Kevin Walsh along with Eric Horvath, Director of Public Works for the City of South Bend.
“Our jobs as civil engineers might not be glamorous or recognized, but we need to do them well,” Pepperman concludes in her essay. “Lives depend on it.”
Pepperman will begin work in August as a water resources engineer in the Indianapolis office of the global engineering and advisory firm TYLin.
—Mary Hendriksen, Notre Dame Engineering