During the Spring Governance Meetings on March 16, the ABET Board of Delegates, which is comprised of representatives from each of ABET’s 35 member societies, elected 2024-2025 officers.
Dr. Laura Dietsche was named as the 2024-2025 ABET president-elect and Larraine Kapka was elected as the 2024-2026 treasurer. Dr. Thomas Hanley was reelected as the 2024-2025 board of directors’ secretary and Dr. Thomas Conry was elected as 2024-2027 at-large director. They will be inaugurated during the Fall Governance Meetings later this year.
Dr. Laura Dietsche received both her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and is a licensed professional engineer. Her career in industrial research and development spans over 35 years with Dow Chemical Company, where she is known for the application of transport fundamentals and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to advance chemical and polymer processing technology and material development. Dietsche continues to work in the area of numerical modeling with a recent focus on hybrid machine learning models. In addition to her industrial career accomplishments, she is passionate about enhancing her profession through volunteer activities. She is involved in improving the quality of engineering education through her 20+ years of volunteering and leadership within ABET and the AIChE Education and Accreditation Committee. Dietsche is also a recent past chair of the Chemical Engineering Technology Operating Council (CTOC) of AIChE and is a past chair and a current director of the Mid-Michigan section of AIChE. Currently, she serves on the AIChE Fellows Council and Public Affairs and Information Committee (PAIC).
Larraine Kapka is a professor emeritus at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio. She received her B.S. degree from the University of Missouri in mechanical engineering and has M.S. degrees from both the University of Central Missouri (industrial management) and the University of Dayton (mechanical engineering). She is a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Ohio, where her disciplinary specialty is heating, ventilating and air conditioning.
Before working in academia full-time, Kapka served in the Air Force and spent 20 years working in industry as a Department of Energy contractor. She has significant experience preparing self-studies for ABET visits at her own institution as a faculty member, department chair and assistant dean. She has served as an ABET evaluator and team chair for several years. Kapka currently serves as at-large director; previously she was the Engineering Technology Area Delegation director for ABET. Besides being an ABET director and program evaluator, she has been the chair for the subcommittee designing training for new program evaluator candidates. She spends hours each year updating and teaching this course.
Kapka is a proud recipient of two awards she earned while working in industry: being named an “Energy Manager of the Year” by the Department of Energy and receiving a national Federal Energy Efficiency award. As an academic, she received the Rousche Excellence in Teaching award from the League for Innovation. Besides her work in ABET, she remains active in both American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and ASME, serving on the latter’s Committee for Engineering Technology Accreditation and as a national scholarship evaluator.
Dr. Thomas R. Hanley is a professor of chemical engineering at Auburn University. After earning three degrees at Virginia Tech and a tour at the Air Force Materials Laboratory, he moved to Tulane University, where he served as AIChE student chapter advisor and chaired the New Orleans Section. At Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, he chaired AIChE’s Terre Haute Section. While department chair at Louisiana Tech and Florida A&M/Florida State University, he was General Arrangements Chair (1986 Annual Meeting), Meeting Program Chair (1988 Annual Meeting), and chair of the Tallahassee Section. While dean of engineering at the University of Louisville, he chaired the Student Chapters Committee, the Management Division and the AIChE Foundation. He served on the Career and Education Operating Council and the Board of Directors. An AIChE Fellow, he chairs the Audit Committee, serves on the Executive Committee of the AIChE Foundation and the Education and Accreditation Committee, and participates on the International Committee and in the North American Mixing Forum. A member of the Committee of 100 at Virginia Tech, he served on the Plasticolors Board of Directors and the Michigan Tech college advisory board.
Hanley has previously served on the ABET Board of Delegates Audit Committee and Board of Directors Audit Committee. He was also a member of the Engineering Accreditation Commission from 2010-2014. Hanley has been a program evaluator trainer since 2016. This will be his second term as secretary.
Dr. Thomas F. Conry holds the rank of professor emeritus of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Conry joined the faculty in general engineering — an interdisciplinary department — at the University of Illinois in 1971 and served as head of department from 1987-1998.
For his volunteer work, he served as a program evaluator through the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in the late 1990s. Since 2009, he has continued this role as a program evaluator through the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), which aligns better with his academic interests and experience. He served as a team chair on the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) for five years. Following this, he was appointed as ASEE’s representative on the Board of Delegates, where he completed two terms as secretary. Currently, he serves on the ABET Audit Committee and holds positions as an Area Delegate and Board Delegate for the EAC.
Conry has been a member of ASEE since he began his teaching career in higher education. Currently, he is a member of the Accreditation Activities Committee and served one term as its chair. He is a Life Fellow of ASME and has been an active volunteer since 1971.
Conry earned a B.S. in engineering mechanics from Pennsylvania State University in 1963, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1970, respectively.