A member of the Process Team at Velo3D, a manufacturer of LPBF metal 3D printers with proprietary SupportFree™ technology. • New material and process development: Includes core, skin, and proprietary processes for Ni, Fe, Ti, and Al-based materials.• Powder metallurgy: Led characterization and qualification for new powders, including chemistry, flowability measurement, PSD, etc.• Laser stitching: Developed a novel algorithm to accurately adjust laser position and eliminate stitch lines when multiple lasers are used.• Customer escalations: Swiftly address customer concerns by tuning existing processes or developing new ones, as required.

Sole Materials Engineer at Gantri, a producer of designer articles using 3D printing of sustainably sourced materials.• Process engineering: Currently lead print process development at our production facility, sporting one of the largest fleets of FDM 3D printers. Additionally, I work with vendors to specify and control incoming feedstock, for end-to-end process control.• Recycling and sustainability: Pioneer and lead efforts with external vendors for shredding and recycling of waste material from production into new feedstock. This material will be used for internal components, where diminished properties are acceptable.• New material and process discovery: Explore and develop new material systems and finishing processes that can potentially improve product quality, surface finish, and yield, while increasing productivity and reducing carbon footprint and labor costs.

The team builds new products while working closely with contract manufacturers in Asia throughout the design process. • New product development: Competitor benchmarking, prototyping, simulation and experimental evaluation of design, and materials selection for structural components and coatings. This includes Design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (DFMEA).• Collaborating with offshore contract manufacturers: Review initial specifications, write test plans, perform validation testing on samples, and specify changes to ensure requisite performance and compliance with specifications before mass-production.• Failure analysis and sustaining engineering: Work with the Customer Support department to identify top failures on returned malfunctioning products, perform failure analysis, and roll out changes before the next batch is mass-produced.

A member of the Materials team at Desktop Metal, a manufacturer of office-friendly metal and composite 3D printers.• New alloy development: Led powder specification, sintering process development, microscopy and microanalysis, and Design-of-Experiments and statistics-backed process qualification for the development of five materials for the Studio System™ (including Stainless Steels, Tool Steels, low-alloy steels, and Ni-based superalloys). • Development of materials processing equipment: Worked closely with the hardware and applied science teams in the development of the Studio System™ furnace, one of the smallest vacuum furnaces capable of sintering stainless steels.• Post-processing: Developed and qualified post-processing techniques such as heat-treatment, case hardening, nitriding, and mechanochemical surface finishing of additively manufactured parts with partner vendors. • Material science-based solution development: Developed the getter system, which provides an atmosphere of required purity and allows sintering of certain sensitive materials on the low-cost Studio System™ furnace.• Expertise and knowledge sharing: Provided technical expertise to customer-facing teams and helped develop content for the Desktop Metal Knowledgebase, a platform to make internal best-practices available to external users.• Select other projects: Geometry accuracy and compensation (USPTO application US20180307209A1), toolpath planning, development of infrastructure to store experimental data (including IoT-based equipment logging).

The Master of Engineering program at UC Berkeley includes a capstone project, which ties together the technical and leadership training.Title: Improving Reliability of 3D Printed Materials in Biomedical Applications• Worked on the corrosion aspects of metal additively manufactured parts, in the context of orthopedic implants.• Developed novel low-cost methods to characterize the surface of additively manufactured parts.

Worked on my Bachelor's Thesis as a student intern at the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory, Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech.Title: Design-of-Experiment Based Process Optimization for Single-Crystal CMSX-4® Ni-based Superalloy Processed Through Scanning Laser Epitaxy (SLE)• Learned about additive manufacturing technologies that can be used for metals in general, and for Ni-based superalloys in particular.• Understood the conditions that favour epitaxial growth of crystals, and how they can be utilized for obtaining deposits that are microstructurally continuous with the underlying substrate.• Performed experiments as a part of a Design-of-Experiment based process optimization for the single crystal Ni-based superalloy CMSX-4, to determine the best parameters.• The experiments were followed by metallography and characterization.For more detail, please look at shashankhr.com/research

Title: Investigation of recrystallization due to compression straining in Ni-based superalloy GTD 444• Learned about Ni-based superalloys, particularly Single Crystal (SX) and Directionally Solidified (DS) superalloys, used in jet engines and gas turbines.• Gained exposure to the scale of R&D operations, and became aware of the magnitude of specificity of research in Industry. • Understood the importance of microstructure, and how subtle changes therein could result in large changes in macroscopic properties.• Understood the criticality of Solution Heat Treatments (SHT).• Performed systematic metallographic analysis on the heat-treated samples in an effort to find recrystallized grains. • Analyzed and quantified micrographs using image processing techniques.

Title: Manufacture of miniature gratings using liquid electromigration• Studied flow pattern formation due to liquid electromigration and thermomigration in Gallium.• Worked in nanofabrication and nanocharacterisation facilities (in the cleanroom), at Centre for Nanoscience and Engineering, IISc.• Learned to use a Scanning Electron Microscope, with its various peripheral functions such as EDS and EBSD. • Gained experience with image and video processing techniques, and mathematical analysis tools.