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In this paper, we present an overview of an NSF CAREER project, in which we seek to advance academic well-being by understanding how engineering faculty experience and reproduce experiences of professional shame. We present an overview of our data collection of non-standardized interviews with engineering faculty (n = 21) and how we are using interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine select individual cases (n = 12). We report our preliminary insights that 1) participants experienced complex and manifold socially constructed expectations that form the basis of their professional shame experiences and 2) participants’ experiences of professional shame varied according to how central their roles as faculty were to their identities. We describe our immediate next steps to integrate the processes of two qualitative studies so that we can generate insight into how engineering faculty link their experiences to their departmental cultures and ultimately train departments to build cultures where faculty and students are able to live well with the experience of professional shame.