About IDEAL's Leaders

Ashley Ater Kranov, Ph.D.

Ashley Ater Kranov is ABET's Managing Director of Professional Services. Her department is responsible for partnering with faculty and industry to conduct robust technical education research and providing educational opportunities on sustainable assessment processes for program continual improvement worldwide.

She is Principal Investigator of a NSF-sponsored validity study of her direct method for teaching and measuring the ABET professional skills and is adjunct associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.

During her more than 21 years as a higher education administrator and professional educator, Ater Kranov has led university-wide assessment initiatives, coordinated regional and professional accreditation activities, taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and conducted faculty development workshops on teaching and assessment worldwide.

Ater Kranov holds a B.A. in art history and French studies from Hampshire College and an M.A. in theoretical and applied linguistics, an Ed.S. in educational leadership, and a Ph.D. in adult and organizational learning from the University of Idaho.

James Warnock, Ph.D.

James Warnock received his bachelor's in biological sciences from the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and his master's in biochemical engineering and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Birmingham, UK.

During his doctoral studies, he spent two months as a research fellow in the Department of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at Kobe University, Japan. Warnock relocated to Atlanta, GA, in 2003 and spent two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology with a joint appointment between the School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering.

Currently, Warnock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Mississippi State University and serves as the chair of the departmental assessment committee. During 2010-2011, Warnock was the Assessment and Accreditation Coordinator for the James W. Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University. During this time, Warnock had responsibility for coordinating the assessment activities of 10 engineering/computer science programs within eight departments, preparing self-study reports and organizing materials for the 2011 ABET site visit. In July 2011 Warnock was invited to become the first Adjunct Director for Educational Research and Assessment at ABET. He has consequently been involved in the planning, preparation and facilitation of numerous ABET workshops, including the one-day Program Assessment Workshops and IDEAL. He is an ABET Senior IDEAL Scholar.