Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight will be led by Kota, said White House.
AB Wire
The White House today announced the name of Sridhar Kota, an Indian American engineering professor, as the lead of an US consortium that will identify new technologies to enhance the country’s innovative ecosystem, manufacturing competitiveness and national security.
According a White House statement, the Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight will be led by Sridhar Kota, who is currently the director of Institute of Manufacturing Leadership at the University of Michigan.
Prof. Kota was quoted by IANS as saying, “‘Foresight’ is the key word. In this ‘think-and-do’ tank, we will identify emerging technologies early on so the nation can invest public and private sector dollars in a way that builds the infrastructure, knowledge and workforce skills needed to anchor manufacturing technology in this country.”
“With collective access to over 30,000 subject matter experts across a wide range of industries, MForesight will serve as a continuous mechanism for research coordination across the public and private sectors”, he added.
The consortium will work for broadening the current range of technologies in the US that would benefit the deprived in getting access to essential commodities. One immediate goal of the team is to find a cost-effective method to improve the quality control of drug manufacturing, thus making available certain cancer medicines that are facing shortage.
The task ahead of the team is to ponder the possibilities of finding new platforms that could be best used for manufacturing low cost technologies like flex circuits that are currently being used for consumer goods, defence and health care.
Prospective technologies will be evaluated by the experts based on many different criteria such as economic impact, job growth, possibilities of private co-investment, impact on other industries and above all how beneficial they would be for the US as a pioneer in this field.
France Cordova, director, US National Science Foundation (NSF) said to AINS, “Engineering and scientific advancements based on fundamental research have been the main drivers of US economic growth over the past half century.”
“Thanks to innovative technologies enabled by manufacturing research, production has grown at its fastest pace in more than a decade, creating significant economic value for the nation. To continue to reap these benefits, we must seek new research frontiers for manufacturing and pursue them for high-impact US manufacturing innovation and economic competitiveness”, she added.
Kota has authored over 200 technical papers on product design for manufacturability and bio-inspired engineering systems and owns over 25 patents. He was assistant director for advanced manufacturing at the White House from 2009 to 2012 and was the brain behind president Obama’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership in 2011 and Manufacturing Innovation Institutes in 2012.