Dr. Michael A. Groeber is the Director of Manufacturing at the Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research, Faculty Director of the Artificially Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (AIMS) Lab, Director of Research for the Minority Leaders Research Collaboration Program, and an Associate Professor in both the Integrated Systems Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering departments at The Ohio State University. Dr. Groeber’s passion and vision is in the integration of data analytics and optimization with manufacturing processes to advance the U.S. manufacturing community. Dr. Groeber’s research focuses on developing autonomous robotic systems that integrate real-time data collection and analysis for manufacturing, handling, and inspecting engineering components. His other research projects focus on the quantification/representation of materials and microstructure for improving process and property modeling. Dr. Groeber’s recent work aims to develop understanding of local processing conditions and their effects on material structure in metallic additive manufacturing and thermomechanical forming. Dr. Groeber is also a principal developer/inventor of SIMPL and DREAM.3D, a unique software library and application package that integrates a flexible, hierarchical data structure with numerous digital microstructure, image processing and data analytics tools to facilitate the advancement of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME). Dr. Groeber is also driven by increasing diversity in STEM fields and is the Director of Research and PI for the $50M Minority Leaders Research Collaboration Program, funded by the U.S. Air Force, whose mission is to develop a national consortium for advancing research opportunities and capabilities and minority serving institutions. Prior to joining OSU, Dr. Groeber worked for 10 years in the metals processing and characterization, sensing, and analytics research groups within the Air Force Research Laboratory. Dr. Groeber received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2003 and 2007, respectively.