Ned Crankshaw was appointed Dean of the College of Design in July 2024, after serving as Acting Dean for two years. He joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky Department of Landscape Architecture in 1990. As a faculty member in Landscape Architecture, he has collaborated extensively in teaching and research with faculty members in Architecture, Interior Design, and Historic Preservation. The organizing philosophy for his studios and his cultural landscapes course is that thoughtful landscape architectural practice relies on understanding and empathy for the intrinsic values of regional and local landscape character. Crankshaw has a record of research activity in cultural landscape management, and especially in ways to incorporate thoughtful contemporary design into historic landscapes. His more recent work is in two areas. One involves the wellness benefits of human contact with nature in urban landscapes and the other involves strategies to increase urban tree canopy to mitigate higher temperatures driven by climate-change.

Ned Crankshaw is a registered Landscape Architect and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He holds a BLA degree from Ball State University and an MLA from Iowa State University, and has professional practice background in Portland, Maine, Des Moines, Iowa, and Syracuse, New York. Along with teaching at UK, he has also been a visiting faculty member in the Landscape Architecture programs at Iowa State University and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He was chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at UK from 2010-2022. He is a former member and chair of the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board, which oversees the accreditation of 100 landscape architecture degree programs in the United States, and he continues to participate in LAAB site visits.