As a medical advisor to SME, I have been able to further understand and influence the activities surrounding growth and awareness in the medical additive manufacturing community. Our group of advisors come from all areas within medical manufacturing, and each of us carries a unique contribution toward furthering the impact of SME’s activities to enhance enabling and emerging technologies.
Outside of SME activities, I continue to serve the medical market in understanding, embracing, and implementing additive technologies as they continue to advance innovation and patient care. I’m inspired by the stories of additive manufacturing (AM) community members who make an impact in the medical field.
This edition of Voices AMplified features two leaders who never intended to become experts in 3D printing, but whose absence in the space would be immense if their original career aspirations came to fruition. Lucky for us, their paths led them to AM, where their contributions, talent, and willingness to share what they know are improving the AM community and serving as examples for those exploring their own career paths.
The first feature highlights the career of Mihaela Vlasea, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing Lab (MSAM) in Ontario, Canada. Mihaela planned to enter the medical field until a project leveraging a 3D printer to create bone-like structures from ceramic powder got her hooked on the potential of AM in orthopedics and beyond. From there, she built her own 3D printer, which ignited a desire to work in a hands-on environment with a dynamic team and transformative technology. She has since built a career that connects industry and academia on projects that address supply chain issues related to COVID-19, create new ways to use holographic printing, and translate lessons from the academic to the applied space. She shares several inspiring examples of her collaborative work.
The second feature shines a light on Brian Post, who leads the Manufacturing Systems Design Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), an organization dedicated to researching solutions to big problems. Brian discusses ORNL’s work, partially funded by the Department of Energy, to reduce industrial energy use, as well as support the administration’s goals of carbon reduction. His journey wasn’t always linear. He planned to pursue a career in surgical robotics before an internship with professor Lonnie Love turned him on to the amazing potential of 3D printing.
In the article, Brian shares his interest in large-scale concrete printing, which makes up a sizeable share of industrial energy consumption. “If there’s a way to use less of it,” he stated, “we’ll save a significant amount of energy while also cutting CO2 emissions, which account for roughly eight percent of the global footprint.” Solving big problems, indeed.
Sharing our community’s stories, including those of Mihaela and Brian, advances our mission, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
