About GTMI
Whether it’s developing new products, reducing costs, or increasing accessibility, innovations in manufacturing can improve the lives of companies and consumers alike. The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) is leading that charge with a mission to cultivate, scale, and integrate those innovations into the market — and develop the workforce needed to maintain them.
Innovation at the speed of thought
With increasing investments in revitalizing America’s manufacturing infrastructure, the U.S. is experiencing a manufacturing renaissance. The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) convenes industry leaders, government partners, and top researchers to collaborate on the grand challenges facing manufacturing today: accelerating technology development and deployment; creating, maintaining, and filling quality jobs; ensuring global competitiveness; and advancing economic and environmental stability.
Officially established as one of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes in 1991, GTMI has been a national leader in advanced manufacturing technology for decades. Our vision is to ensure rapid innovation that secures U.S. dominance in advanced manufacturing. Through the design and development of artificial intelligence systems, secure digital manufacturing, additive and subtractive processes, and large-scale production enterprises, GTMI stands at the forefront of manufacturing innovation — leveraging state-of-the-art facilities to turn research breakthroughs into market-ready solutions.
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Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute: Rapid Innovation at Scale
Video Summary: As one of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) brings together industry leaders, government partners, and leading researchers to address the most pressing challenges facing U.S. manufacturing. Whether developing new products, reducing costs, or increasing accessibility, manufacturing innovations have the potential to improve the lives of companies and consumers alike. GTMI is leading these efforts by cultivating, scaling, and integrating new technologies into the marketplace while developing the skilled workforce needed to support the future of manufacturing.
Speaker: Thomas Kurfess, Executive Director, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)
Thomas Kurfess: GTMI. Those letters stand for the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and we're all about manufacturing—how do you take an idea, realize it into a product, and then scale it up for the population?
We actually have a unique ability here where we can go from very small materials development, where we're trying to understand the properties and structures of materials, up to pilot-scale production. This is possible in part because of the advanced tooling that we have at our disposal that can help us push the boundaries unlike any other institute that I personally know of.
Georgia Tech is a great place for manufacturing research for a number of reasons. We have some of the top students in the world here at Georgia Tech learning all of the disciplines that need to come together to make manufacturing happen.
The second thing that makes Georgia Tech unique relative to other universities is the partnerships with companies who are partnering with Georgia Tech because of manufacturing.
When you partner with GTMI and Georgia Tech as a whole, you don't just get the academic wherewithal of Georgia Tech. You also get the business and industry that has been working with Georgia Tech, and GTMI specifically, for decades. We can bring more horsepower into the conversation than other institutes simply don't have the capability to provide.
What excites me most about the future of manufacturing research within GTMI is the fact that we have made significant impact, we are making significant impact now, and we will continue to make significant impact.
Manufacturing is so important to the health of the state of Georgia and to the health of the United States of America—not just the economy, but national security. There's always a need for manufacturing to do things better, less expensively, more efficiently, and to produce new types of products.
Whether you come back in 5, 10, 20, or 30 years, we're still going to have a lot of great problems to solve. We're going to make sure that our facilities are always state-of-the-art and on the leading edge so that we can solve those problems for the country.