Industrial Advisory Board

Sonia Alreja is the Operations head for VJ X-Ray. She received her undergraduate degree in Economics from New York University in 2010. She started her career working in politics for a US Congressman and a lobbying firm focusing on energy production. Since 2014, she has worked in growing the VJX team and customer base. Today with over 50,000 units the field, VJ X-Ray is a global leader in complete x-ray sources and high voltage generators specializing in the security inspection field and food quality.

Dr. Kevin Anderson is Senior Technical Fellow for Brunswick Corporation, Mercury Marine Division, located in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin.  

Dr. Aaron Birt is Co-Founder & CEO of Solvus Global and Kinetic Batteries, located in 104 Prescott Street Worcester, MA 01605.

Herb works for General Motors as an Aluminum Casting Technical Specialist. He received his BS in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Florida. His Thesis topic was Fabrication of NiAl-Al2O3 Composites via Reactive Hot Compaction. He has co-authored over 200 papers and is the inventor on 11 patents. Herb’s primary interests are aluminum alloy and heat treat development, aluminum casting process optimization, gray and ductile iron process improvement and additive manufacturing via Laser Powder Bed Fusion. He has held positions in manufacturing, engineering and research & development.

Joy Forsmark has been a technical expert in metals research at the Ford Motor Company Research and Advanced Engineering Laboratories in Dearborn, MI since 1999.  Joy has worked on numerous Ford research programs on the mechanical properties, processing methods and performance simulation for Al and Mg components in both powertrain and automotive body applications.  Currently, she works in the Manufacturing and Metals Research Department leading efforts in 3D printing for metals to understand process/properties relationships for material behavior under a variety of modalities, including laser powder bed, binderjet-sintering, and direct deposition technologies.  Joy received her B.S. in Materials Science from Rice University and M.S. and PhD. Degrees in Materials Science from the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Furrer is the Senior Fellow Discipline Lead for the Materials and Processes Engineering Discipline within Pratt & Whitney. He is responsible for leading the Pratt & Whitney Materials Discipline Chiefs and Fellows in the development of technical strategy and the development/evolution of engineering standard work for all processes within the discipline. David also supports materials and process design, development, and production transition programs, including efforts related to manufacturing, aftermarket, and service investigation initiatives. Additionally, Dr. Furrer oversees overall discipline health and critical skills identification, and Materials and Processes Fellows Council activities. David is also involved with new and emerging manufacturing processes development and transition into production, including such technologies as conventional and novel machining, coating, cleaning, casting and additive manufacturing processes. He is the champion for the Pratt & Whitney materials and processes data management and analytics technical focus, and computational modeling tools and methods activities aimed at increasing the speed and fidelity of materials and process development and definition. He has over 30 years of experience in the areas of aerospace materials engineering, including forging manufacture, and materials and process modeling. In addition to previously working within the aerospace and forging industry, he has been an adjunct professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he taught materials and manufacturing technology courses within the Mechanical Engineering Department. David has received Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Doctorate of Engineering from the Universität Ulm, Ulm Germany. Dr. Furrer is a Fellow and Past President of ASM-International, the materials information society, and is also a member of TMS and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

Jeff Grabowski is recognized as an international thought leader in advanced materials design and commercialization across industries from aerospace to medical devices, and materials systems from light metals to refractory alloys. As the Manager of Business Development for QuesTek Innovations, Jeff is at the forefront of identifying the most pressing materials challenges faced by industry, and arriving at solutions by leveraging their proprietary Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) technologies. He is actively helping to develop and execute QuesTek’s strategy for a complete “Materials Digital Transformation” of its business in partnership with the world’s most innovative materials producers and material end-users. In earlier roles at QuesTek, he led efforts that expanded the qualification and adoption of QuesTek’s ICME-designed steels into new and demanding applications, including commercial aircraft, safety-critical Navy landing gear, space exploration, high performance racing transmissions and oil and gas production.

Dr. Eric Gratz is Co-founder and CTO of Ascend Elements (formally Battery Resourcers),  a former Assistant Research Professor at the Metal Processing Institute at WPI, has expertise in recycling, battery materials and extractive metallurgy.  Dr. Gratz is responsible for the technical development of novel recycling processes at Battery Resourcers.  He served as the CEO of Battery Resoucers from 2016 to 2020 where he grew Battery Resourcers from a 300sq ft lab to a fully vertically integrated pilot plant providing shredding through cathode production services of spent lithium ion batteries and battery materials.  Dr. Gratz is a primary inventor on eight lithium ion battery recycling and battery materials patents. He has been working on lithium ion battery recycling since 2012 and is recognized as a global technical leader in the space. He holds a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D from Boston University in 2012 in materials science and engineering where he studied extractive metallurgy.

Roger Hajjar is currently head of Research & Development at Flagship Pioneering focused on gene therapy companies. He is an internationally renowned scientific leader in the field of cardiac gene therapy having led First-in-Human gene therapy trials in patients with heart failure. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology and completed his training in internal medicine, cardiology, heart failure/cardiac transplantation and research fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where he then directed the Cardiology Laboratory of Integrative Physiology and Imaging. From 2007 to 2019 he was the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, and the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He has authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications and has received numerous scientific awards for his achievements in the field of cardiac gene therapy including the Young Investigator Award of the American Heart Association, the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Johns Hopkins University, the Mount Sinai Dean’s award for Excellence in Translational Science, the American Heart Association Distinguished Achievement Award and the Thomas W. Smith Award of the American Heart Association. He is the co-founder of a number of biotechnology companies including Celladon, Nanocor/Asklepios, and Bethphagen.

Dr. Charlie Kuehmann is Vice President of Materials Engineering and NDE for SpaceX and Tesla. He has been a leader in computational materials design since its inception. In creating the first company dedicated to commercializing computational materials design, he’s innovated the first materials and alloys from this new technology; from high-performance steels for race cars, aluminum alloys for aircraft, gear materials for helicopters, high-temperature alloys for turbine engines, and even bubble-gum. As the computational materials design revolution has gained momentum, and been embraced by government and private R&D organizations through the Accelerated Insertion of Materials and Materials Genome Initiative, Dr. Kuehmann has brought the technology to the consumer electronics industry and most recently to electric vehicles and spacecraft. Dr. Kuehmann currently leads the materials engineering organizations at both Tesla and SpaceX, driving material solutions to enable the world’s transition to a sustainable future, the commercialization of space and a multi-planetary civilization.

Professor Ronald Li is the CEO and Founder of Medera Biopharmaceutical Limited (“Medera”). Medera is a clinical-stage gene therapy company dedicated to next-generation cell and gene therapies for difficult-to-treat and incurable diseases.  The Group consists of 3 subsidiaries: Novoheart International Limited, Sardocor Corp. and Xellera Therapeutics Asia Limited.  The Group’s fully integrated pipeline uniquely and comprehensively covers drug discovery, cell & gene therapies and scalable Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP)-compliant manufacturing of next-generation therapeutics for patients. He is an internationally recognized expert in cardiac electrophysiology, human heart cell & tissue engineering and pluripotent stem cells with over 200 peer-reviewed publications.  He is a professor-turned serial entrepreneur with successful track records in biotech from fundraising, public listing, mergers and acquisitions, privatization, joint ventures, licensing, etc. He has served as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Davis and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. During his tenure at Johns Hopkins University, Professor Li was a two-time recipient of the Top Young Faculty Award (2002, 2004) in addition to being named Top Young Investigator (2001), Top Postdoc Fellow (2001).  He also won numerous awards including the Young Investigator Award 1st Prize of Heart Rhythm Society in 2002, the American Heart Association Best Study of the Year (2005) and Groundbreaking Study of the Year (2006).  Professor Li was the Founding Director of the Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Consortium at the University of Hong Kong. He is also the Former Director of Ming-Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine, Karolinska Institutet (KI), HK/Sweden.  In 2015, he received the Spirit of Hong Kong Innovating for Good Award by South China Morning Post. He was named Distinguished Visiting Professor by the University of Toronto and Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Waterloo (2018).

Dr. Martinez received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara with Prof. Alison Butler, where her worked focused on the colligative properties of soft matter.  Jen was then a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow, 2002-2004, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Between 2004 and 2018, Jen was founding Co-Deputy Director of the Institute for Materials Science and Scientist IV within the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos.  Jen then went on to be foundingDirector of ¡MIRA!, Center for Materials Interfaces in Research and Applications (a materials science and diversity center) and Professor within the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Northern Arizona University (2018-2022). At NAU, Jen and close colleagues started ¡MIRA!, a new department, and a PhD program in Applied Physics and Materials Science. Currently, Jen has rejoined Los Alamos and is Deputy Division Leader for Materials Physics and Applications Division (MPA). Her research interests span: fluorescent silver and gold nanoclusters; nanomaterials superlattice structures under pressure; genetically engineered transition metal coordinating polymers; and high-throughput selection of catalytic and optically active materials. Jen has been honored with a number of awards and recognitions, such as the William Yslas Velez outstanding STEM award (2019); Los Alamos Fellows Research Prize (2016); AAAS Fellow (2012); Kavli Fellow (2012) (18^th Kavli German-American Frontiers of Science); PECASE (2008); and LANL Outstanding Mentoring Awards (2007 and 2011- her most prized!).

Pravin Mathur is the Executive Director, Linde Technology, serving the Metals, Combustion and Energy market segments at Linde. He manages Linde’s application technologies to steel, non-ferrous, glass, cement, and energy markets. In addition, Mathur is responsible for global key accounts in the steel market served by Linde. Mathur joined the company in 1991 and has co-invented post-combustion and CoJet® gas injection technologies for electric arc furnaces. Mathur has published over 50 papers and has 10 patents to his credit. Mathur earned his Bachelor of Technology degree in Metallurgy from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1984. He earned his MS and PhD in Materials Engineering from Drexel University, Philadelphia in 1986 and 1988, respectively, and an MBA from Drexel University in 1990.

Dr. Amir Mazaheripour is a research scientist on the Materials team at Neuralink, which is dedicated to developing brain-machine interfaces. Dr. Mazaheripour obtained a B.S. degree in Materials Science at Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Materials Science at the University of California, Irvine. His work focused on chemistry and charge transport in organic semiconductors. He performed synchrotron measurements at the Elettra light source in Trieste, Italy as a visiting scientist, and also participated in a Mars In-Situ Resource Utilization Workshop at the California Institue of Technology along with JPL and NASA scientists during this time. He subsequently completed postdoctoral work on ion- and electron-conducting polymers for energy harvesting at University of California, Santa Barbara. His current work focuses on materials testing and development of bioelectronic capabilities for neural probes.

Dr. David B. Smathers is Applications Engineer/ Fellow at Materion Corporation (Formerly H. C. Starck, Inc. Newton, MA). He is a R&D metallurgist focused on Nb applications including RHEA/RCCA/RMPEA Alloys.

Dr. Jim Yurko is Senior Distinguished Engineer, Materials Engineering at Apple, located at Cupertino, CA.

Dr. Jason Van Sluytman is Lead Producibility Engineer at Honeywell Aerospace. He is a team member of internal research & development high temperature ceramics division. He is also a principal investigator of CMAS-related activities & Co-PI of processing techniques that are used for ceramic coating manufacturing, which is implemented into aero(IGT-) engines.  Additional duties include managing budget year-to-year, assisting legal and contracts to protect IP prior to customer trials, & working with marketing to pursue new avenues of growth.   

Mark Verbrugge started his GM career in 1986 with the GM Research Labs after receiving his doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the College of Chemistry at the University of California (Berkeley). In 1996, Mark was awarded a Sloan Fellowship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received an MBA. Mark returned from MIT in 1997 to join GM’s Advanced Technology Vehicles (ATV) as Chief Engineer for Energy Management Systems. In 2002, Mark rejoined the GM Research Labs as Director of the Materials and Processes Lab, which maintains global research programs ranging from chemistry, physics, and materials science to the development of structural subsystems and energy storage devices. The Lab was later expanded in scope and is now the Chemical and Materials Systems Laboratory. Mark has published and patented in topic areas associated with electroanalytical methods, polymer electrolytes, advanced batteries and supercapacitors, fuel cells, high-temperature air-to-fuel-ratio sensors, surface coatings, compound semiconductors, and various manufacturing processes related to automotive applications of structural materials.

Donnell Walton is director of the Corning Technology Center—Silicon Valley. In this role, he leads research and business development to match Corning’s existing and emerging capabilities and opportunities in the western United States.

David Weiss is Vice President of Research & Development at Eck Industries, Inc, located at Manitowoc, Wisconsin.