Advanced Manufacturing Center Builds Core Team

The new Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing hires three project leaders who will play critical roles in guiding and performing research projects in surface engineering and manufacturing systems.

The Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM; Richmond, VA) recently announced the hiring of three project leaders who will play critical roles in guiding and performing research projects undertaken in the center’s focus areas: surface engineering and manufacturing systems.

CCAM is a collaborative research center that brings global manufacturing companies together with Virginia’s top research universities and its own expert engineers and scientists. Working together under one roof on challenges common to advanced manufacturing, the center accelerates the transfer of research discovery and innovation to commercial, production-line use.

Kevin M. Farinholt, Ph.D., joins CCAM as the project leader for manufacturing systems. As a project leader, Farinholt will take the lead on assigning resources, managing timelines and performing tasks to complete projects in the center’s manufacturing systems research program. Additionally, a portion of his responsibilities will include leading efforts to identify and aggressively compete for federal funding opportunities in the center’s focused areas of research.

Farinholt, who earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech in 2005, comes to CCAM from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where he served on the lab’s technical staff leading research in energy, manufacturing and engineering initiatives. “I’m excited to work so closely with business interests and academic experts in the same lab,” he said. “The different perspectives will lead to new ideas and incredible results. Managing that process of discovery is going to be a lot of fun.”

Benjamin Zimmerman and Matt Stremler join CCAM as project leaders in surface engineering and will manage and perform research projects in surface engineering, primarily in coatings and related processes and materials.