If we want to maintain a manufacturing base in the Lehigh Valley, this is the way we need to go.”Īt Pennsylvania College of Technology, a special-mission affiliate of Penn State in Williamsport, Vice President for Workforce and Economic Development Tracy L. “From the community college’s perspective,” says Pierpoint, “we want to be sure that anyone who wants to introduce this new manufacturing technique has the workers they need to do it. Hence, as innovations emerge from NAMII, Northampton will be among the first to disseminate them. “One of the tools we got was a 3D printer it was one of the first in the region.” “The facility was put together to try to help inventors and people with ideas to create real physical objects,” he says. Paul Pierpoint, Vice President of Community Education for Northampton Community College, explains the school got involved with NAMII in part becuase it already has a fabricating lab in South Bethlehem. The community colleges in particular will play an important role in connecting innovations in additive manufacturing to their deployment in industry: these colleges have experience teaching 3D printing from when it was used on a smaller scale for prototyping and modeling and they will train future workers for expanded additive manufacturing.ĭr. Of the 14 universities and community colleges in NAMII, half are in Pennsylvania, ranging from research universities such as Penn State and Carnegie Mellon to community colleges such as Westmoreland Community College and Northampton Community College. Although NAMII's headquarters are located in Youngstown, Ohio, Pennsylvania will play an outsized role in the new institute, which is expected in turn to benefit the commonwealth. Additive manufacturing thus saves material and energy and is increasingly important to Pennsylvania and industry. In this process, instead of cutting away materials from a raw shape in order to produce a finished object, the object is built, layer by layer, by precisely depositing or fusing material with the help of a computer. The institute hopes to facilitate collaboration to improve and expand additive manufacturing, colloquially known as 3D printing. In August 2012, a consortium of 65 companies, universities, community colleges, and non-profit organizations won a three-year, $45-million grant from the federal government to establish and operate the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII).
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