Melissa Orme

VP, Additive Manufacturing Boeing

Melissa is a renowned pioneer, innovator and leader in the developing field of Additive Manufacturing, where her seminal work in additive manufacturing spans three decades and has resulted in 15 US patents. Melissa has a rich and diverse professional background, having begun her career in academia where she rose to the rank of Full Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California Irvine. There, she established globally recognized research laboratories in the field that is now termed ‘Additive Manufacturing,’ where she developed methods for controlled electrostatically charged and deflected molten metal droplet deposition for precision manufacturing, direct writing of electronic components, and precise powder production. Subsequently, she transitioned from academia to high tech startups where she served as the Chief Technology Officer of Morf3D, a company that is focused on producing and delivering flight qualified additively manufactured hardware to the aerospace industry. From Morf3D she was recruited by Boeing to lead Additive Manufacturing across all business units. In the capacity of Vice President of Additive Manufacturing at The Boeing Company, Melissa leads a highly innovative team that drives advanced engineering solutions to complex design problems for commercial airplanes such as the 787 Dreamliner; space and launch vehicles such as Artemis SLS rocket; satellites such as the O3b constellation; vertical lift programs such as the Chinook helicopter; fighter airplanes such as the F/A-15 and F/A-18; and autonomous vehicles such as the MQ-25 refueling drone. Insertions of Additive Manufacturing into these and other flight vehicles has been demonstrated to enhance quality and performance while simultaneously saving millions of dollars. Additionally, Melissa oversees Boeing research, both internal and external, focused on Additive Manufacturing including the development of new processes; materials; manufacturing digital transformation for industry 4.0; the creation of the digital thread; machine learning and data analytics. Melissa has been a leader in additive manufacturing since the early days when she was an outlier in her academic department, advocating for adoption of manufacturing processes of the future. Today she leads a team of highly creative engineers, some of whom have never designed for traditional manufacturing, and have adopted and regularly implement additive manufacturing as a standard manufacturing technology in order to solve complex engineering problems on Boeing products, reducing cost and improving performance.