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As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly evolves, its integration into civil engineering presents both significant opportunities and challenges. Through a qualitative analysis of interview, survey, and reflection journal data, this study explores the perspectives of early-career civil engineers regarding the current and potential roles of AI in engineering practice. While AI is seen as a valuable tool for automating routine tasks and enhancing efficiency, concerns persist about its reliability, ethical implications, and potential overreliance. Participants emphasized the importance of maintaining human oversight, with AI serving as an aid rather than a replacement for engineering judgment. The study identifies key competencies essential for engineers to effectively and ethically integrate AI, including AI literacy, critical thinking, ethics, and cybersecurity awareness. As AI continues to influence the field, it is crucial to equip engineers with these competencies through education and ongoing professional development. The paper offers recommendations for integrating responsible AI practices into engineering education and the workplace, highlighting the need for continuous training in both technical skills and ethical decision-making. This research contributes to the growing literature on responsible AI integration, providing insights that can guide the future workforce in navigating the complexities of AI-enhanced engineering practices. 

Much of the diversity of microbes from natural habitats, such as soil and freshwater, comprise species and lineages that have never been isolated into pure culture. In part, this stems from a bias of culturing in favor of saprotrophic microbes over the myriad symbiotic ones that include parasitic and mutualistic relationships with other taxa. In the present study, we aimed to shed light on the ecological function and morphology of the many undescribed lineages of aquatic fungi by individually isolating and sequencing molecular barcodes from 127 cells of host-associated fungi using single-cell sequencing. By adding these sequences and their photographs into the fungal tree, we were able to understand the morphology of reproductive and vegetative structures of these novel fungi and to provide a hypothesized ecological function for them. These individual host-fungal cells revealed themselves to be complex environments despite their small size; numerous samples were hyper-parasitized with other zoosporic fungal lineages such as Rozellomycota.