Panelists
Martin Baumann
Martin Baumann is President & CEO of Arburg, Inc. Arburg is the US market leader for injection molding machines, servicing customers with an extensive service network and 3 tech center in the USA. Martin has spend is 30 year career in injection molding, extrusion, melt delivery and recycling. Buying the best equipment in any industry isn’t helpful, if there aren’t well-trained people to operate it at peak performance.
Torsten Kruse
Aaron Smith
Aaron Smith, CDS, A Dover Corporation. A dynamic leader whose career in software and high-tech spans three decades, Aaron Smith is responsible for the marketing and solution execution of the CDS Visual strategic vision. With a wealth of cross-functional experience and deep operational expertise across both small and large companies, Aaron specializes in helping Industrial Manufacturers leverage the power of visualization to drive sustained growth and high-impact results.
Prior to joining CDS Visual, Aaron was a solution engineer at Vistagy, where he led customer-facing sales activities and customer support.
He has also served as a product manager at PTC for the Windchill PLM product, as a support engineer at InPart, which was acquired by PTC, and as a Mechanical Engineer at Applied Materials in the Ion Implant division.
Aaron is active in coaching youth soccer and volunteers for a non-profit organization in San Jose.
Lyndsay Petersen is the Finance Manager at Prestige Mold and Pres-Tek Plastics, sister companies specializing in both the manufacture of injection molds and medical molding. She has worked within the manufacturing industry for over 15 years. She received her Graduate’s degree from the University of Redlands and her Bachelor’s degree from CSUSB. Her passion to work with the youth inspired her to begin a Girl Scout Troop over 10 years ago. After a couple of years within the program, she was asked to step into a more demanding volunteer role and be on the Service Unit Team for the City of Upland within Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles. After numerous years on the team, Lyndsay has now stepped into the role of Service Unit Manager, leading the team, and providing support to more than 50 troops. Encouraging the youth - especially females - to learn about STEM career exploration is her goal. She is currently working with Society of Plastics Engineers and Girls Scouts of Greater Los Angeles to develop an Intro to Polymers Badge Program focusing on the benefits of plastic, recycling efforts and the understanding that a plastic-free world is impossible.
Shelby Icamen
Shelby Icamen – Manager, PPD Applied Manufacturing. Shelby participated in an internship program at Applied Medical while earning her Chemical Engineering degree at Cal Poly Pomona. She understands the value of participating in on-site programs and how it can accelerate your career path. Completing her internship in 2016, Shelby has moved through the Process Engineering path and now serves as Engineering Manager at Applied Medical.
Shelby contributes to the efforts of reaching out to the youth and is a STEM presenter to 6th graders in individual classrooms.
As a millennial herself, she artfully matches the needs of the organization with the opportunity for the youth.
Willie Briscoe
Willie Briscoe, Hope Leadership Academy. Willie grew up in Portland, Oregon with his mother, brother and two older sisters. His love for basketball grew along with his size. At age 18, Willie was 6”6’ and headed off to play college basketball at a local Junior college, because his grades were too low to play Division 1.A would play 2 years of junior college basketball and lead his team to a championship in 1989.
Returning to basketball and school at Point Loma Nazarene University in 1999, Willie played for 2 more and 1 year as an assistant basketball coach before graduating with a bachelor degree. Willie started a small personal training business in North County San Diego, and for three years provided a steady income for his growing family. Hope Leadership Academy (HLA) was launched in 2010. They serve over 1000 kids from underserved, fatherless home and their program includes mentoring programs, spiritual development and education tutoring
Iman Jones
Iman Jones - Oakley
“Making Plastics “Fun”
As an effective leader in manufacturing for over 25 years, Iman has been part of the exponential growth at Oakley for many of those years. With a focus on maintaining and supporting the culture that Oakley’s brand lives by, Iman knows what it means to attract a high level of talent and integrate that talent into the organization. As a Six Sigma Black Belt, Iman brings his experience into an interactive workplace.
Carisa Chavez is the Program Supervisor for MiraCosta College’s Technical Career Institute where she designs accelerated work skills programs in high demand fields to get students trained in highly valuable skill-based work. She feels she makes a difference by training and connecting students with their future careers in technology. She works with top North County businesses bringing real world situations and scenarios to the classroom, to better prepare hundreds of students by getting them in a tech field, trained and employed with leading firms in healthcare, manufacturing and engineering. Chavez is a team oriented, task efficient, ambitious, extremely hard-working people person. She is constantly looking to support internal and external partners, interdisciplinary teams and clients to drive performance. As a problem solver and quick thinker, with a deep knowledge of the needs of industry, Chavez works to bridge the gap between industry and education to connect talent to opportunity.
Kate MacArevery-Colello
Kate MacArevey-Colello, Mira Costa College Technical School. Kate is an experienced engineer and plant leader turned teacher. Kate prides herself on being the friendliest nerd in North San Diego County. As a work-skills instructor teaching a full-time, 600-hour engineering technician training program at MiraCosta College Technology Career Institute, Kate gets to do her favorite thing every day: collaborate with motivated learners, many of whom come from non-traditional career pathways and underrepresented populations. In addition to teaching at MiraCosta TCI, Kate runs a monthly New Tech Tuesday event, which aims to provide a bridge between learners and experienced technical thought leaders by giving attendees an opportunity to nerd out together about what's new in North County tech. Kate's proudest accomplishment is leaving engineering to raise a family and then working her way back into a technical role. She's a firm believer and an example of the fact that there are untapped populations of employees in the world who are watching and waiting for the right career opportunities.
Israel Dominguez
Mr. Dominguez- Director of Economic and Workforce Development, Saddleback College, holds a Master in Business Administration degree with a concentration in Leadership and Management from the University of La Verne, and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree with a concentration in Marketing Management from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. As the Director of Economic & Workforce Development, Mr. Dominguez serves as the primary external workforce and training representative of the college to agencies, consortia, industry partnerships, and regional workforce groups throughout the region. He is responsible for cultivating and promoting positive and substantive relationships with local business and industry. He develops and delivers fee-based customized training solutions for business and industry as well as seeks workforce development grants to provide educational and career opportunities for targeted populations in South Orange County. He serves as a leader of and an advocate for the College within the external community.
Dylan Saunders
Dylan Saunders. Founder of Sanders Engineering and Manufacturing
As the founder of Sanders Engineering and Manufacturing, Dylan serves as President SPE Chico and President 3DP Chico. Serving Chico State University as the lab manager, Dylan was also responsible for serving as the president of 3D Printing Club at CSU Chico.
Dylan is a strong community and social services professional with a Bachelor of Applied Science - BS in Mechanical Engineering from California State University, Chico. Minors in physics and sustainable manufacturing with a focus in plastic manufacturing and design for plastic manufacturability. 7 years CAD experience with the program Solidworks, as well as 7 years experience working on and around additive manufacturing operations including FDM, SLA and filament fabrication.
Marlo Dressigacker Kohn
Marlo Dreissigacker Kohn (Stanford BS ’05 Product Design; MS ’07 Mechanical Engineering) is the Associate Director of the Product Realization Lab and a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. After graduating, Marlo took a design engineer role with a medical device start-up called Vibrynt, where she was fortunate to work with leadership that valued in-house prototyping and manufacturing. Led by a colleague with a background in plastics engineering from UC Davis, Marlo and the team of design engineers learned and practiced rapid iteration of molded parts in their device system. In 2010, she returned to Stanford as the founding manager of the PRL’s rapid prototyping and digital fabrication lab Room 36, which serves over a thousand students each year. In 2015, after the PRL received a gift to support the purchase of a modern Arburg molding machine, Marlo created a new course in the Design and Manufacturing curriculum called Making Multiples: Injection Molding, to share her experiences with injection molding as an advanced prototyping process with students. Since then, she has guided more than 165 students through the design of parts and tooling, which students machine and mold in the PRL. Partnerships and site visits with local molding vendors help bring context and exposure to significantly more advanced tooling and molding processes to the students in this course.
Torsten Kruse is the founder and president of Kruse Analysis, Kruse Training, and the highly anticipated VR innovation, Molding Expert. With an illustrious career spanning nearly three decades, Torsten has played a pivotal role in advancing injection molding, offering cutting-edge CAE simulation services, software applications, and premier online training for design and process engineers.
Before starting his own companies, Kruse had a successful seven-year career with Arburg, Inc., working on various molding applications and developing and delivering training programs in Germany and the United State. Kruse traveled extensively to obtain a wide spectrum of hands-on industry experience that he now shares with his simulation and training clients.
Throughout his career, Torsten's influence extends beyond personal achievements, as underscored by his establishment of Kruse Training. This platform offers invaluable learning opportunities tailored to novices entering the field and professionals seeking to enrich their expertise. Torsten's dedication to training is evident, as he not only initiated one, but two enterprises solely dedicated to imparting intricate nuances of injection molding to aspiring part designers, mold designers, and process engineers.
Scott England
Scott serves as VP of Molding for Merit Medical in Salt Lake City where he joined in 2015, after spending 18 year with Becton Dickinson. Scott is passionate about training and supporting a path for employees to achieve a meaningful career path.
Scott will share with us how the culture at Merit Medical creates career growth as a major focus. With over 6,000 employees, Merit prioritizies employee satisfaction, continuous learning opportunities and internships. Merit is described as “welcoming”, “multicultural” and a “family-like work environment”. Merit continues this commitment to the loyal workforce by employing some of the brightest minds in the industry during steep growth and deploying technology and innovation.
