McDaniel has been awarded the college level Teacher of the Year award in recognition of her work organizing the Georgia State Speech Contest (the largest speech contest they have organized to date), as well as the numerous administrative duties she performs for both Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgia Association of Teachers of Japanese.

Aya McDaniel (Nakanishi) joined the School of Modern Languages as a Japanese language instructor in 2014.  She earned her M.A. in Foreign Language Education and Research from Kansai University, Osaka Japan. She started her teaching career as a fellow at Emory University, where she continued to teach as full-time instructor until she came to Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interest is in the development classroom activities and materials. She has presented her papers at ACTFL Convention, AATJ Conference and others. She has made a kanji textbook and a workbook for Intermediate Japanese class with Dr. Masuda. She is the Introductory Language Program Coordinator of Japanese language.