NextFlex Recognizes Several Dedicated Individuals Making Significant Contributions To The Flexible Hybrid Electronics Industry

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- NextFlex, America's Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) Manufacturing Institute, today announced the launch of its NextFlex Fellow Award, which recognizes the outstanding achievements of individuals across industry, government and academia for their remarkable contributions to accelerating the NextFlex mission and the FHE industry in the U.S. The winners of the inaugural award were honored today at NextFlex's headquarters during a technical council meeting, which kicks off a two-day workshop focused on FHE Impact on Health and Safety of the Future (March 1^st & 2^nd). 

Today's winners, hand-selected by NextFlex's leadership team, are an impressive group of scientists and engineers, business leaders and professors, who were chosen for the depth of their contribution to FHE across technology, manufacturing and workforce development. The Fellow Award winners are:

• Azar Alizadeh, Senior Material Scientist, GE Global Research
• Daniel Gamota, Vice President, Engineering, Jabil
• Robert Smith, Senior Quality Engineer, The Boeing Company
• Daniel Hines, Scientist, Laboratory for Physical Sciences
• Mark D. Poliks, Professor and Director, Binghamton University
• Anwar Mohammed, Senior Director, Flex
• Homer Antoniadis, Head of the Silicon Valley Technology Center, DuPont

"As a prelude to our upcoming workshop, I can't think of a more appropriate time to launch this award, which recognizes some of the talented trailblazers who have helped shape our industry and get NextFlex to where it is today," said Dr. Malcolm Thompson, executive director for NextFlex. "The seven initial recipients of our award truly reflect and embrace our organization's charter and what we have set out to do—to bring FHE mainstream. We applaud the outstanding achievements that these true FHE pioneers have, and are making, with respect to transforming FHE into a commercially viable industry of technological innovation that will have a major impact in nearly every aspect of our lives." 

Thompson added that once in full production, FHE will usher in a new era of "electronics on everything." Intelligence will be taken out of the "boxes" or packages associated with traditional electronics like PCs, smart phones and tablets, and transplanted directly on to a variety of surfaces including the human body, enabling an entirely new breed of commercial and defense and applications we haven't yet imagined. Working alone, it would take years, perhaps decades, and unprecedented amounts of capital for a company to create the infrastructure to make mass production of FHEs a reality. NextFlex, along with its members and those individuals specifically honored today with the Fellow Award, have been tirelessly working to rapidly uncover and solve the complex manufacturing issues associated with production of flexible hybrid electronics, and ultimately create a manufacturing infrastructure that can efficiently be spun out to private industry.  

About NextFlex
NextFlex®, America's Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute, is a leading force in the Manufacturing USA network of Institutes. Formed through a cooperative agreement between the US Department of Defense (DoD) and FlexTech Alliance, NextFlex is a consortium of companies, academic institutions, non-profits and state, local and federal governments with a shared goal of advancing U.S. manufacturing of FHE. Since its formation in 2015, NextFlex's elite team of thought leaders, educators, problem solvers, and manufacturers have come together to collectively facilitate innovation, narrow the manufacturing workforce gap, and promote sustainable manufacturing ecosystems. For more information, visit www.nextflex.us and follow NextFlex on LinkedIn and Twitter.

SOURCE NextFlex