It’s a challenge for any company to efficiently invest in research and development (R&D) for advanced manufacturing applications. Costs are high and success is not a given. Joining industry peers in R&D to reduce risk also presents a dilemma: How do you help drive your company and the industry forward with technological innovation without...

“Remember Goldilocks—not too fast, not too slow, just right. You ready?” That’s Dr. Bob Voigt, a Materials Science and Engineering professor at Penn State University, coaching me on my first casting experience.

I’m wearing a reflective silver suit from head to toe, high-temperature gloves, and a face shield. Minutes before, I’d been scooping sand...

Today, manufacturing accounts for 25 percent of U.S. energy consumption and carbon emissions, and the industrial sector as a whole is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the nation, at 30 percent. Changing how industry produces materials and products is...

America Makes Ecosystem Director Kimberly Gibson, a municipal planner by training, was involved in the national additive manufacturing institute at its inception more than 12 years ago. She saw the proposed innovation institute as a pathway to help reinvent Northeast Ohio’s manufacturing and industrial base from its legacy of coal, steel, and...

“A lot of people think you can’t get high performance when you’re using recycled materials, but we’ve proven that’s not true,” says Haley Keith, CEO of MITO Material Solutions. A new product, Fenix Fiber+, is an innovative combination of MITO’s hybrid graphene additives and Vartega’s sustainably sourced carbon fiber. Together, they are ready to...

While the U.S. legacy manufacturing sector continues to build a skilled workforce, secure the domestic supply chain, and widely adopt technological innovations, there is an area in which the U.S. is positioned to secure global leadership - the bioeconomy.

The bioeconomy is often cited as a pathway to securing everything from climate change and...

“I think I want to be a plumber because plumbing seems like a big puzzle,” says 17-year-old Ella, who I met at a National Manufacturing Day event sponsored by MSC Industrial Supply Co. in Knoxville, Tenn. Ella is a tiny, timid girl hiding behind glasses and blazing blue hair. It’s an ah-hah moment for me. “Oh, you like puzzles?” I respond....

The manufacturing employment gap has existed for years, but some manufacturers have built great work cultures and evolved with societal changes to successfully build talent pipelines. In some areas, local stakeholders have created education and workforce development (EWD) programs that utilize local manufacturers and specialty partners to feed...

“You can see their eyes light up when they learn about something new. Aha, it happened!” shares Vanina Ghossein, her own face beaming. Her enthusiasm for a new curriculum she has helped develop around composites for K-12 is palpable. “I love everything about it–from planning an activity, looking for materials, deciding how students should do it...

Health care innovators are working toward a future in which an ailing patient can receive a new bodily organ without having to wait for a human donor.

That’s one piece of the grand vision behind emerging work in biofabrication — which is the manufacture of living cells, tissues, and organs — and it’s part of a potential economic engine that...

“I just thought this was the coolest place. It looks like Tony Stark’s basement, so I said, ‘Let’s do this!’”

That was New Jersey native turned Michigan resident Staff Sgt. Cameron Homburg’s reaction to his first visit to LIFT, the Detroit-based Department of Defense national manufacturing innovation institute, as he considered what his civilian...

It looks like a simple creek crossing. A small deck, some guardrails, riprap below. On the windy roads of rural East Tennessee, there are thousands of small bridges that look similar, but this bridge is like no other. The Little Bridge That Could has the power to change the way we approach infrastructure in America.

Morgan County, Tenn., is the...

The COVID-19 pandemic fractured the global supply chain in many places, with shortages ranging from PPE to semiconductors to consumer products. But even before the turmoil began in spring 2020, supply chains were vulnerable.

Natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires and other unexpected developments like labor strikes and political unrest...

Nearly 50% of all startups fail within the first 5 years, and those in the technology industry have the highest rate of failure in the United States. Those are daunting odds for even the brightest minds like Hicham Ghossein, CEO of the startup Endeavor Composites. But he’s not intimidated because he has a team of professional support, starting with...

Imagine life choices as a maze of doors. Your path relies on which doors you open, and one door leads to another. If you fail to open one door, you miss out on an entire set of possibilities. When you think of it that way, our job becomes simple: make sure the doors of opportunity open for everyone.

Take Victor Haynes II, nicknamed “Deuce.” He’s 13...