Dr. Christopher Saldaña is the Ring Family Professor and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. He previously held the Harold and Inge Marcus Career Development Professorship at the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State. Dr. Saldana’s research has focused on developing integrated frameworks for describing relationships between processing, structure and properties for advanced manufacturing operations. He is an expert on materials processing and nondestructive evaluation with 15 years of experience in the precision manufacturing sector and a focus on multi-scale materials and metrology characterization for supporting new product development and realization of next generation manufacturing processes. His current work is focused on process qualification and process design tools for hybrid additive/subtractive manufacturing and AI-enabled manufacturing. He earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees from Purdue and Virginia Tech, respectively, and has been recognized with several awards, including an NSF CAREER award, the Robert J. Hocken SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer award and an R&D100 Technology Award.