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About
John Hart is co-founder and Board member of VulcanForms, and Department Head of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he runs the Mechanosynthesis Group focused on advanced manufacturing, additive processes, and nanotechnology. He met co-founder Martin Feldmann when Feldmann took his graduate course on additive manufacturing at MIT; the two founded VulcanForms in 2015 to bring laser-based metal 3D printing to true production scale. Hart is one of the most cited academic voices in advanced manufacturing in the United States.
Previous roles
- Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT (2013–2020)
- Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Art/Design, University of Michigan (2007–2013)
Notable work
- Hart and Jamison Go identified the force, heat-transfer, and motion limits of fused-filament fabrication, then built a threaded-filament, laser-preheated printhead and high-speed gantry that printed at up to ten times the volumetric rate of commercial desktop systems.
- Hart and Sebastian Pattinson developed an additive process for cellulose acetate that produced mechanically robust parts and could add antimicrobial functionality, extending 3D printing to an abundant, biorenewable polymer.
- Hart co-founded VulcanForms after work to rearchitect laser powder-bed fusion for industrial throughput; its production system coordinates arrays of lasers delivering up to 100 kW alongside machining, post-processing, automation, and a digital thread.
- Hart co-led MIT's contribution to a first-of-its-kind field demonstration that repaired a corroded Massachusetts bridge beam in place by additively depositing steel, supported by a scan-to-deposition digital thread and subsequent structural evaluation.
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