ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | OCTOBER 2024 36 SHAPE MEMORY SOCIETY NEWS SMST ANNOUNCES NEW OFFICERS AND MEMBERS The Shape Memory & Superelastic Technologies (SMST) board, at the recommendation of the SMST Awards and Nominations Committee named three reappointed officers, Ashley Bucsek as president, Srinidhi Nagaraja as vice president/finance officer and Othmane Benafan, FASM, as immediate past president to serve on the SMST Board for the 2024-2026 term. New members to serve on the SMST Board for the 2024-2027 term are Burkhard Maaß, CEO/CTO, Ingpuls GmbH, Germany, and Scott Robertson, vice president – Nitinol Technology, Resonetics, Calif., and Mohammad Reza Farahani, University of Minnesota, to serve as Student Board Member for a one-year term 2024-2025. Continuing as members are Frederick Calkins, Tom Duerig, FASM, Max Launey, Eric Lehuta, William LePage, Paul Motzki, and Martin Wagner. Retiring from the board are Timofei Chekalkin, Andreas Undisz, Eathan Devine, and Parikshith Kumar (conference co-chair). Alan Pelton and Darel Hodgson will continue to be advisors on the board. Burkhard Maaß is the CEO/CTO of Ingpuls GmbH, a German company that produces and develops a wide variety of shape memory alloys. He received his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in materials science at the Ruhr University Bochum, at the Institute of Prof. Gunther Eggeler and under the mentorship of Prof. Jan Frenzel. His research focused on the metallurgy and processing of quaternary alloys with small hysteresis. Parallel to the Ph.D., he co-founded Ingpuls together with Christian Grossmann and André Kortmann, starting as a consultant for companies looking into SMA. After consulting, the tasks changed to engineering and later to prototype production for actuator systems, where binary, ternary, and quaternary alloys were implemented. In 2016, the company changed its purpose once again, becoming the only SMA producer in Germany that had the complete integration, from melt to finished component. Maaß is also MD of Ingpuls Medical, a joint venture between Ingpuls and Resonetics, where the focus lies on high purity Nitinol for medical applications. Scott Robertson is the vice president of Nitinol Technology at Resonetics. He has over 20 years of research and engineering experience focused on the manufacturing, design, testing, and FDA regulatory submission of Nitinol medical devices with companies ranging in size from small start-ups to major medical device corporations. He has over 40 peer-reviewed publications, patents, and patent applications in the field of medical devices. Prior to joining Resonetics in 2023, Robertson was vice president of Mechanical Engineering & Design at Adona Medical, a Shifamed-incubated company, where he developed a novel shape-memory adjustable interatrial shunt and Bucsek Benafan Nagaraja Maaß Farahani Robertson Calkins Launey Duerig Lehuta Motzki LePage Wagner 3
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