Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Craig Blue, Defense Manufacturing Program Director at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was recently elected to a two-year term on the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation Consortium Council, a body of professionals from academia, state governments, and national laboratories that provides strategic direction and oversight to IACMI.
The council appointment brings Blue back to a familiar organization. He served as IACMI’s founding chief executive officer in 2015 after he and colleagues won funding to create an institute for advanced composites as part of the Manufacturing USA initiative. He sees interactions among ORNL, the University of Tennessee and more than 120 other university and industry partners as key to both ORNL’s success and to national manufacturing and security goals.
“Opportunities for collaboration like those between ORNL and IACMI are bringing research into application to better prepare America for a secure, sustainable future,” said Blue. “And us having these industry connections is key to capturing new opportunities and growing our portfolio. Working hand-in-hand with industry ensures we are working on the right problems.”
The manufacturing industry is no stranger to Blue, who has spent the past three decades in the manufacturing ecosystem. In 1995, he took a postdoctoral position at ORNL. Around 2007, he led the lab’s research to create an advanced manufacturing capability, later becoming the founding director of DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL in 2011. After establishing IACMI in 2015, Blue returned to ORNL in 2016 and now directs the burgeoning Defense Manufacturing Program. In this role, he brings ORNL’s manufacturing expertise in composites, additive manufacturing, machining, artificial intelligence, machine learning and materials science to challenges facing the Department of Defense.
Blue promotes a spirit of collaboration and optimism toward improving America’s manufacturing sector and maintaining critical infrastructure and defense systems. His appointment to the IACMI board promotes continued collaboration with industry and further positions ORNL as a manufacturing leader.
“Through collaborations like this, we have been working to stand up a manufacturing ecosystem in East Tennessee that is unparalleled. From additive and carbon-fiber composites to data analytics and cybersecurity, ORNL has incredible capabilities,” Blue said. “When you consider our partnership with the University of Tennessee, manufacturing growth in the South overall, and our location where Interstates 40 and 75 come together, ORNL is really at the epicenter of manufacturing R&D for this country.”
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Eric Swanson and Liz Neunsinger
