Ann McKenna

Ann F. McKenna is the Vice Dean of Strategic Advancement for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, and is a professor of engineering in the Polytechnic School, one of the six Fulton Schools. 

McKenna’s research focuses on entrepreneurial thinking in the context of engineering faculty mentorship and curricular innovations, design teaching and learning, the role of adaptive expertise in design and innovation, and the impact and diffusion of education innovations. 

She was named one of the nine 2019 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Fellows for demonstrating outstanding contributions to engineering education. McKenna has been an ASEE member since 1996.

McKenna is PI on the NSF-funded ASU Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project that focuses on instilling an additive innovation and risk-taking mindset among faculty to transform engineering teaching practices. She is also PI on the Kern Family Foundation project that is conceptualizing and implementing a national-focused effort on applying an entrepreneurial mindset approach to faculty mentorship. She was a co-investigator and instructor for the first I-Corps for Learning project, which fosters an entrepreneurial mindset in the education community to design and implement novel and effective teaching strategies, technologies and curriculum materials.

McKenna has twice been the recipient of the ASEE best overall paper award (1998 and 2011), as well as the recipient of the outstanding paper award from the IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference (1997). Her work in the area of design education has been nationally recognized by receiving the best paper award for three consecutive years, 2009, 2010, and 2011 in the Design in Engineering Education Division of ASEE. She has also received the best research paper (2018) and best teaching paper (2017) in the Entrepreneurship and Engineering Innovation Division of ASEE. McKenna works across the disciplinary lines of engineering, education and design and has published in diverse disciplinary venues including Science, the Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Computer, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, and Teaching in Higher Education.

McKenna recently served as a senior associate editor for the Journal of Engineering Education (2012-2015), the leading research journal in the field of engineering education. She served a two-year term (2011-2013) as a director of the Educational Research and Methods (ERM) Division of ASEE. She was a member of the Advisory Board for the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium (2011-2013), as well as a panel member for Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council's (NSERC) Chairs in Design Engineering (CDE) program (2011-2014).

Prior to joining ASU, she served as a program director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Undergraduate Education, and was the director of education improvement in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. McKenna received her bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from Drexel University and doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.