The TCT Top 20

1. Wilfried Vancraen, Materialise

After finishing a Master in Electro-Mechanical Engineering in 1985, Wilfried Vancraen worked as a Research Engineer and Consultant at the Research Institute of the Belgian Metalworking Industry, which is where he first discovered 3D Printing.

Passionate about this new technology and firm in his belief that it could help create a better and healthier world, he started Materialise in July 1990, where he remains CEO to this day.

Wilfried holds several patents related to the technical and medical applications of 3D Printing and remains committed to using the technology to make positive changes in people’s lives.

In recognition of his work, he was awarded the RTAM/SME Industry Achievement Award in 2011, which is considered the highest honor in the 3D Printing industry.

2. Abe Reichental, 3D Systems

Abe Reichental has been the President and Chief Executive Officer of 3D Systems since September 2003.

Through his passion to democratise the ideation-to-production process, the company has evolved and expanded its business model from a supplier of 3D printers to a provider of end-to-end solutions that are transforming entire industries by empowering professionals and consumers worldwide to create and make.

Abe is a passionate maker and community service leader.  He is the recipient of the regional 2011 E&Y entrepreneur of the year award, two Innovator Awards and holds 25 U.S. patents. His activities include several non-profit board memberships, frequent speaking engagements in various product development and management organizations, participation in several Harvard Business School Case Studies and Singularity University programs.

3. Terry Wohlers, Wohlers Associates

Terry Wohlers is principal consultant and president of Wohlers Associates, Inc., an independent consulting firm he founded 25 years ago. Through this company, Wohlers has provided consulting assistance to more than 170 organizations in 23 countries. He has authored nearly 400 books, articles, and technical papers and has given 90 keynote presentations on five continents. He has been interviewed by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, USA Today, and others, and has appeared on several television news programs.

In 2007, more than 1,000 industry professionals from around the world selected Wohlers as the #1 most influential person in rapid product development and additive manufacturing. The results were published in TCT Magazine as part of its TCT Top 25 Influential People survey. In 2004, Wohlers received an Honorary Doctoral Degree of Mechanical Engineering from Central University of Technology located in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

4. Bre Pettis, MakerBot

Passionate about invention, innovation, and all things DIY, Bre Pet   founder of NYCResistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn, which incubated MakerBot Industries, where he is CEO.

MakerBot Industries brings the future to your desktop with affordable, open source 3D printers. MakerBot users print their creations and share their designs on Thingiverse.com, a community hub with over 20,000 downloadable designs. Before co-founding MakerBot, Bre was a  TV host/producer for Make Magazine, a new media creator for Etsy.com, a schoolteacher, artist, and puppeteer.

5. Peter Weijmarshausen, Shapeways

Peter Weijmarshausen is the CEO for Shapeways, one of the world’s leading 3D printing marketplaces and communities. The NY start-up harnesses 3D printing to help anyone turn ideas into a physical reality, making product design more accessible, personal, and inspiring. Shapeways prints everything on-demand, which means that every order is customised and personalised.

Prior to Shapeways, Peter was the CTO of Sangine, where he and his team designed and developed satellite broadband modems and Director of Engineering at Aramiska, where he was responsible for delivering a business broadband service via Satellite.

Earlier in his career, Peter worked as ICT manager for Not a Number where he facilitated the adoption of the widely successful open source 3D software Blender.

His global expertise is in the fields of Entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and business development, 3D printing, designing and implementing scalable Internet services.

Outside the Top 5, the list becomes alphabetical and does not reflect the actual votes received.

Kai Backman, Tinkercad

Kai is a founder and CEO of Tinkercad, the world’s first browser based solid CAD and the best way to get started with 3D printing.
 
Since its launch in 2011 the site has grown into a large community of non-professional users collaborating and sharing designs.

Before founding Tinkercad Kai worked at Google as a systems engineer and has previously founded two companies among them an indie game studio.

His favorite pastimes includes writing ARM machine language, building yet another robotic rover and designing asynchronous distributed systems.

Kai is a founder and CEO of Tinkercad, the world’s first browser based solid CAD and the best way to get started with 3D printing.
 

Adrian Bowyer, Bath University & RepRap

Adrian Bowyer did a first degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College in 1973, and then did a PhD in tribology there.

In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Department of Mathematical Sciences to do research in stochastic computational geometry. He then spent several years as the head of Bath's Microprocessor Unit in what is now Bath University Computing Service s.

In 1984 he took up a lectureship in manufacturing in Bath's Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is now a part-time senior lecturer.

His main areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the creators of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and the engineering use of biology, called Biomimetics. In Biomimetics he works on self-copying and self-assembly in engineering.

Bowyer is the originator of the worldwide RepRap Project - a project that has created an open-source self-copying 3D printer: a REPlicating RAPid-prototyper. He is also a founder and director of RepRap Professional Ltd - a company formed to sell RepRap-related products and services.

Scott Crump, Stratasys

Scott Crump has been the CEO, President, and Chairman of Stratasys since its inception in 1988 and was the Chief Financial Officer until May 1997.  Mr. Crump and his wife Lisa Crump, are co-founders of Stratasys, and Scott is the inventor of the Company’s FDM technology.  

From 1982 to 1988, Mr. Crump was a co-founder and Vice President of Sales for IDEA, INC., a manufacturer of force, load and pressure transducers. The company later changed its name to SI Technologies, Inc. Mr. Crump continued to be a director and shareholder of that company until its sale to Vishay Intertechnologies, Inc. in 2005.  

Mr. Crump is a registered professional engineer and received a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Washington State University in 1976 and a business degree from the Anderson School of Business Management at UCLA.

Ping Fu, Geomagic

Honoured in 2005 by Inc. Magazine as “The Entrepreneur of the Year”, Ping Fu describes herself as an artist and a scientist whose chosen expression is business. In 1997 Ping co-founded Geomagic, a leading US software company which pioneers 3D technologies that fundamentally change the way products are designed and manufactured around the world: Used for repairing vintage cars at Jay Leno’s garage to digitally recreating the Statue of Liberty, Geomagic aims to enable design and production of one-of-the-kind products and services at a cost less than mass production.

Before co-founding Geomagic, Ping Fu was Director of Visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she initiated and managed the NCSA Mosaic software project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer. She has more than 20 years of software industry experience in database, networking, geometry processing, and computer graphics.

Ping was recently recognized by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as an Outstanding American By Choice and in 2012 has presented at TED and SXSW events. Since 2010, Ping has been serving on the NACIE (National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship) board at the White House and is a member of NCWIT (National Council on Women in Technology).

Todd Grimm, T. A. Grimm and Associates

Todd Grimm is president of T. A. Grimm & Associates, which offers additive manufacturing and 3D imaging consulting and communications services. He is also a columnist for TCT magazine and editor for ENGINEERING.com. In the 22 years that he has been involved with additive manufacturing, he has played many roles in the industry: author, writer, speaker and advisor.

Todd is the author of “User’s Guide to Rapid Prototyping” and has written hundreds of articles for a wide range of publications. He has served as an editorial advisor for both TCT magazine and Time-Compression Technologies and has become an analyst for GigaOM, which provides expert analysis and research on emerging technology markets.

TCT Live has included Todd as a keynote presenter in three of its conferences. Likewise, the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) has featured Todd as its keynote speaker for its 2010, 2011 and 2012 conferences. Recently, AMUG appointed him to its board as the AM Industry Advisor.

Todd has served as an advisor for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ (SME) technical communities and the organis ation’s RAPID conference. He is a Past Chairman of the society’s Rapid Technologies and Additive Manufacturing (RTAM) community and its 3D Imaging technical group. He is also a recipient of SME’s Master-Level Certificate in additive manufacturing.

Lisa Harouni, Digital Forming

Lisa Harouni is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Forming, a company that works on the software side of 3D printing. Digital Forming’s co-design platform allows professional designers and design orientated companies to exploit the benefits of 3D printing technologies for the mass customisation and co-creation of lifestyle products. Wired Magazine recently described her to be “in the vanguard of a wave of entrepreneurs who want to make it easy for anyone to design and create bespoke products at the click of a button."

Lisa has presented 3D printing and Digital Forming’s work across the globe over platforms such as TED, WIRED, and the Lift Conference, as well as through major international press and television such as the Economist, the International Herald Tribune and Sky News. With a background in economics, she started her career working in the G7 Economics team at Deutsche Bank before moving over to the consumer products business.

Dan Johns, Bloodhound SSC

From as early as he can remember, Dan has had a fascination with the processes for building and making things. It was therefore no surprise that he trained first as a toolmaker and then qualified Mechanical Engineering. He started his career in the Engineering Centre at Exeter University. It was here that Dan first encountered additive technologies when the centre acquired an early DTM machine for Rapid Prototyping.

Dan has spent the last 20 years driving innovations and developing applications with the different processes across industry.

Dan’s illustrious career has seen him introduce innovative applications and real business benefits of additive manufacturing (AM) to a number of high profile companies. These include Howmet Alcoa, where AM was used significantly in the development of the Trent 900 engine for Rolls-Royce; and Airbus, which now boasts one of the UK’s most advanced AM technology centres for aerospace component development.

Currently, Dan is working on one of the most challenging — and open source — engineering projects in the UK: Bloodhound SSC. Bringing his knowledge and experience of AM to this project is allowing him to fully demonstrate the sweet spot of AM for high engineering projects to a much wider audience. And this is Dan’s other passion — inspiring and sharing the AM message.

Neil Hopkinson, The University of Sheffield

Neil is Professor of Manufacturing Engineering at The University of Sheffield where he leads the cross-disciplinary Advanced Additive Manufacturing (AdAM) Group. He has secured over £3.5M of funding generating a wide range of advancements in manufacturing.

Neil is lead inventor of high speed sintering that utilises inkjet technology to significantly increase the commercial potential for sintering based AM to the point of competing on price and speed with high volume injection moulding. He is also named on other patents including a method to eliminate supports from metal AM processes.  Neil is the lead editor of the world's first book dedicated to additive manufacturing for the creation of end use products and has published over 100 papers, including over 40 journal papers. He has won various global awards for technology including the SME award for breakthrough technology 2009 (the only non-USA recipient of this award) and at the tender age of 38 was recognised by AMUG as an industry “dinosaur”.degree in Mechanical Engineering from Washington State University in 1976 and a business degree from the Anderson School of Business Management at UCLA.

Hans Langer, EOS

Dr. Hans J. Langer founded EOS in 1989 and today is its major shareholder steering the strategic direction of the EOS group as Chief Executive Officer.

He contributes more than 30 years of experience in sales and marketing of laser based solutions.

Before founding EOS his career included being Managing Director Europe at General Scanning, Inc.

On a scientific level he worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for plasma physics at Ludwig-Maximilians university in Munich where he received his Ph. D. with a thesis on laser technology.

Dr. Hans J. Langer founded EOS in 1989 and today is its major shareholder steering the strategic direction of the EOS group as Chief Executive Officer.

Chuck Hull, 3D Systems

Charles W. Hull, ‘Chuck’, is the Chief Technology Officer and founder of 3D Systems Corporation in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Chuck invented stereolithography, the first commercial 3D printing and rapid prototyping technology over 26 years ago.

Chuck holds more than 60 US patents in the field and has received numerous awards and recognition for his pioneering work in 3D printing which continues to this day.

Chuck holds more than 60 US patents in the field and has received numerous awards and recognition for his pioneering work in 3D printing which continues

Scott Phillips, Sciaky

A Cum Laude Honors graduate of Michigan State University, holding dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Scott Phillips has “come up through the ranks” at Phillips Service Industries, Inc. (PSI), a private holding company located in Livonia, Michigan that oversees a diverse collection of technology-based subsidiaries.

Beginning his career in 1984 as a Project Engineer, Scott has gone on to hold a variety of positions at PSI, including Sales Engineer, Engineering Manager, Assistant COO and COO. In 2000, Scott was promoted to his current position of President & CEO. Year after year, Scott pushes the technological boundaries of PSI’s subsidiaries, while plotting out a course for further diversification. Scott’s leadership and passion for innovation were critical to Sciaky’s launching of Direct Manufacturing (DM).

Today, Sciaky’s DM remains the only large-scale, fully-programmable means of achieving near-net shape parts made of high-value metals like titanium, stainless steel, nickel and refractory alloys. A resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Scott enjoys outdoor activities with his wife and two children.

Jeremy Pullin, Renishaw

After completing a four year apprenticeship, Jeremy completed a degree in mechanical engineering in Bristol. He went on to support and later develop CNC manufacturing systems including both hardware and software.

Jeremy set up and now runs the Rapid manufacturing centre at Renishaw's headquarters in Gloucestershire including both additive and conventional technologies. T

he centre serves all of the product divisions across the Renishaw group for prototyping, modelling and low volume production.

Jeremy has presented and chaired at conferences around Europe for AM, CAM and CNC technologies. He currently sits on a number of committees for AM technologies in the UK.

Founded in early 2011 by Alice Taylor and three co-founders: Sulka Haro (Habbo), Luke Petre (Little Big Planet), and Jo Roach (Channel 4), MakieLab has just alpha launched MAKIES: a build-your-own 3D-printed ultra-customisable action doll community, soon to be followed by the associated playspace and mobile app.

MAKIES creates 10” poseable action dolls on EOS p100/300 series machines in London and Reading. The dolls are then finished in-house before sending to customers. MakieLab is working on bringing skin colours and more to the process and is actively interested in partnerships here.

Previous to MakieLab, Alice was Commissioning Editor for Education at Channel 4, where she commissioned a string of multiple award-winning games and media targeting teens & tweens, including two BAFTAs for Bow Street Runner and Privates, Best Game & Best Educational for 1066 and Smokescreen at SXSWi, and the Prix Jeunesse for Routes. Previous to Channel 4, Alice was VP Digital Media at BBC Worldwide in Los Angeles.

Gary Rabinovitz, Reebok & AMUG

Gary Rabinovitz holds a degree in Physical Education from Plymouth State University, Plymouth NH. He has managed the Additive Manufacturing Lab at Reebok International’s World Head Quarters, for nearly 15 years. This lab operates Selective Laser Sintering technology, Z Corporation’s 3D printing technology and Objet’s Connex 3D printing technology. Gary held the position of president for the SLS Users Group from November 2001 through the September 2002 conference. He is also a past member of the Editorial Advisory Board of “Time Compression Technologies” publication.

In the fall of 2002, Gary accepted the position of Z Corporation User Group president, a position which he held for 4 years. Gary is currently the president of the AMUG (Additive Manufacturing Users Group) whose mission statement is as follows. AMUG educates and advances the uses and applications of AM technologies.  Gary has also been a member of SME for the past 15 years and a Bright Minds Mentor for the past six years.

David Reis, Objet

Reis is set to have an interesting year having been named Chief Executive Officer of the combined company that will be formed when Objet and Stratasys merge later this year. Appointed to the position of Objet CEO in March 2009 after serving as a company director since 2003, Reis has seen business increase by 80% with 93% increase in profits and 155% increase in unit sales.

Succeeding in building an infrastructure to serve thousands of customers worldwide, including a substantial share of the relevant Fortune 500, Reis has elevated the business into a global leader in 3D printing and additive manufacturing. Objet has cultivated an outstanding reputation as an enabling 3D printing and rapid prototyping technology for product design and development.

From 2006 to 2008 Reis served as CEO and President of NUR Macroprinters Ltd, a wide format printer manufacturer that was acquired by HP. Prior to joining NUR, Reis was CEO and President of ImageID, an automatic identification and data capture solution provider, and of Scitex Vision, a developer and manufacturer of wide-format printers.

Reis holds a B.A. in Economics and Management from the Technion/Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA. from the University of Denver.