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. She is the current Engineering Technology Accreditation 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 in this course.
Kapka is proud 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.
