SME recognizes its 20 Most Influential Academics in Smart Manufacturing

Photo: SME.

SME selected its 20 Most Influential Academics in Smart Manufacturing with the help of industry peers and manufacturing experts by SME Media’s Smart Manufacturing magazine.

“One of the best ways to develop the up-and-coming generation of manufacturing professionals is by exposing them to – as one of our honorees puts it – the pioneers and dreamers who are improving existing technologies and creating new ones,” said Robert Willig, Executive Director and CEO, SME. “Almost all of the 20 achievement-focused honorees number among their top accomplishments educating and shaping the next wave of pioneers and dreamers.”

One of the honourees, Ihab Ragai, Associate Professor of Engineering at Penn State University, spent over 20 years working in manufacturing before joining the ranks of academia. He created one of the industry’s first design-for-manufacturing platforms that tracks manufacturing process data and correlates it to the state of the part to conduct stress analysis and fatigue-life predictions for tooling in the process.

“Many new graduates continue researching the same topics without exploring or identifying other areas that would complete the puzzle,” said Ragai. “Either work in industry for some years to grasp the bigger picture or team up with other members from the academic community with different areas of expertise.”