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‘BUILD OUR RELEVANCE’: We caught up with our new board chair Kaia David, who manages Boeing’s R&D of thermal protection systems and oversees its extreme environment materials group. Kaia previously supported ceramic matrix composite development programs for the FAA and NASA.
What’s your vision for the next chapter for USACA?
I’d like to start with a focus on what USACA does well. Historically, USACA has been a great advocate for its members on policy issues. We also provide access to policy decision-makers on the national stage through visits to Capitol Hill to speak with members of Congress and the Senate and through the government and defense speakers at CMS and our Spring and Fall Technical Meetings.
USACA also provides premier forums where government, industry, and academia can discuss high-quality science and engineering and share recent research findings in an export-controlled venue. That’s in the annual CMS conference and the every-other-year Electromagnetic Windows conference. Finally, USACA provides members a flow of valuable government and industry information.
To build our relevance, we need to know from our membership’s perspective what their biggest interests are in advanced ceramics. What interests do we have in microchips, batteries, EVs, clean energy, biomass, nuclear, hydro, fuel cells, aerostructures, and hypersonics? Who do we see as our primary customers? What is the direct relevance? This will help us focus our messaging and ensure members’ needs are being met.
What do you see as a policy priority?
My perspective as an aerospace prime representative, of course, does not represent the entire USACA membership. Still, I’ve been intrigued by the findings from a 2023 National Defense Industrial Association study on hypersonics supply chains.
One of the included points emphasized the need for a consistent demand signal from the government to industry and academia, ensuring a strong business case for industry investment and a strong push to educate and train a hypersonics-capable workforce.
There’s a lot of valuable information in this report. I’m wondering whether it would be useful to review reports such as these as a trade association to see if they could spark policy recommendations that the membership would find valuable to put forward.
Are there new opportunities in advanced ceramics you’re excited about?
I’m always looking for opportunities to advance the state-of-the-art. I see possibilities for metamaterials and multifunctional materials. But for more near-term impact, key technologies are those that provide lower cost or faster processing at scale, in-line non-destructive evaluation techniques to increase yield, and all things digital.
You’re a fan of the recent DoD-funded partnership between USACA and American Ceramics Society on workforce training.
100 percent. The co-developed Hypersonics course presented at the CMC conference in January and at the National Space & Missiles Materials symposium in June was very well received. And I know the plan is to bring the class to specific locations so people can attend without traveling. Other benefits to our partnership include working together to support the talent pipeline with conference scholarships, networking, resume help, etc.
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