University Times

Pitt’s senior administration runs the University. The faculty here teach classes, conduct research and publish in their fields.

Behind the scenes, University staff, some 7,200 strong across five campuses, provide support for Pitt’s administrators, faculty and students, often toiling in jobs ranging from the mundane to the esoteric.

But occasionally, those lines blur.  J. Andrew Holmes’s job is one of those, where the staffer provides support but does some teaching and mentoring of students as well.

This is one in an occasional series profiling University staff, providing a glimpse of some of the less recognized employees whose primary business is making Pitt work.

Howard A. Kuhn, left, and J. Andrew “Andy” Holmes in the Swanson School of Engineering’s Rapid Manufacturing Lab

J. Andrew “Andy” Holmes has parlayed his associate’s degree in machine technologies and a four-year journeyman apprenticeship program into a multi-faceted 25-year career on the Pitt staff.

Holmes’s winding career path at Pitt began in 1986 as a medical instrument designer-fabricator in the School of Medicine. He came to Pitt from a firm in Warrendale, where he honed his skills in precision prototype machining, fabrication and computer numerical control (CNC) manufacturing.

Now manager of the Rapid Manufacturing Lab, part of the Swanson School of Engineering’s Center for Product Innovation, Holmes recently won a Chancellor’s Award for Staff for Excellence in Service to the University, in part for his unusual hybrid role as a supervisor/teacher/trainer/adviser. (See March 8 University Times.)

The manufacturing lab is utilized primarily by engineering seniors, working in teams of three or four to satisfy their capstone-course project requirements by actually building a finished product.

But in a somewhat atypical situation, Holmes works closely with Howard A. Kuhn, an adjunct faculty member who oversees the academic side of the lab. “This is a team endeavor for us and our mission is to foster a team environment with the students,” Holmes said of his collaboration with Kuhn.

The lab embodies a more recent shift in engineering education to teamwork and hands-on training to design and build products. Holmes said, “Ten years ago students didn’t do this. Ten years ago students wrote reports, they made drawings, they would submit drawings to machine shops and that would be it.”

In addition, machining equipment and technologies have become much more complex since Holmes took his first Pitt job.

“Back in 1986, I worked in the School of Medicine in a small machine shop,” Holmes recalled. “It was pretty basic equipment: a couple machines, a lathe, not very sophisticated; no computer numerical controls, no laser equipment.”

Andy Holmes, left, shows Nate Benya, a senior mechanical engineering student, how to modify car axles on a state-of-the-art lathe in the lab.

Through that work, Holmes collaborated with some doctoral students from the Department of Surgery. One was Jim Antaki, who joined the Pitt faculty after earning his PhD here and took over development of the then-Department of Surgery artificial heart and lung program. When that program received a significant grant, it became the McGowan Center for Artificial Organ Development.

When Antaki and fellow scientists needed a machine shop to develop mechanical devices on site, they asked Holmes to leave his job at the medical school, set up the machine shop from scratch and become the machine/manufacturing liaison at the McGowan center on Second Avenue.

For the next five years he worked in the McGowan machine shop, helping to build the Streamliner artificial heart device and blood pump, a novel magnetically levitated left ventricular assist device.

“I was concerned with not so much how it worked, but how we were going to make it, how I would convert engineering data into something that’s manufacturable,” Holmes said.

“A lot of the way I think about how things are made and how projects are put together and how teams work goes back to the McGowan center. I had a core group of engineers I worked with who all had skills that I didn’t, and I had a skill none of them had and those skills were complementary,” Holmes said.

His move to the McGowan center also coincided with the emergence of computer-aided design systems that introduced the three-dimensional world to product design, a major development in manufacturing technology, he said. “I had to teach myself all that stuff on the fly. But I was so motivated to learn this, I came in on weekends, I worked on my own time,” he noted.

Serendipitously, as the Streamliner device was being manufactured and the related patents were all secured, Holmes was contacted in 2000 by friends at the Swanson School of Engineering, who were planning a facility to teach manufacturing techniques to those working in local industries.

The timing was right. Holmes said he was ready for a new challenge and so once again he agreed to establish a machine shop from scratch and then manage it.

Initially, the Heinz Foundation-supported lab primarily was used as a training facility for local industry personnel, exposing them to the latest engineering technologies.

Holmes said the insights he gained at the McGowan center have influenced his job at the engineering school’s Rapid Manufacturing Lab, providing a number of important lessons he applies in his work in the lab.

“When I met with engineers I discovered many of them really had no idea about the manufacturing aspect. It’s not that they didn’t care; they didn’t know it was relevant,” Holmes said.

About four or five years ago, at the directive of engineering school Dean Gerald Holder, the focus of the lab shifted to be more in line with the educational mission of the school, namely to prepare students for the workforce. “The school had drifted away from that,” Holmes said.

That’s when Kuhn, who is co-director of the engineering school’s Center for Product Innovation, helped Holmes refocus the Rapid Manufacturing Lab to emphasize workforce training for students in the engineering school. He was uniquely suited to the task, having returned to the Pitt engineering faculty in 2008 after an 11-year sojourn into industry as co-founder of Johnstown-based Concurrent Technologies Corp.

In addition to the hands-on learning in the Rapid Manufacturing Lab, courses changed to reflect the new emphasis in workforce preparation, Kuhn said. As a result, he added, engineering education and training has changed for the better.

“There’s much more emphasis on hands-on projects. Almost every course across engineering departments from the junior year on here has some sort of student project. It’s an illustration of the trend in not only project work, but in teamwork, so it all comes together.”

He added that his work in industry as well as his teaching reinforced the need for team-based learning.

“It prepares students better for their work after graduating,” Kuhn said. “When I hear students grumbling about working in teams, I tell them, ‘Get over it. It’s the way the real world works.’”

Not all of the lab’s academic work falls to the faculty members. Although Holmes is a staff member, he lectures on basic manufacturing principles in three undergraduate engineering courses. “I tell them in a general sense: This is how you make things, by either adding material, removing material or forming material — bending it or changing the shape. We go into the capabilities of the Swanson center, the equipment we have and what we can do with it. Basically it’s a platform so they can start thinking about their project and what the Swanson center has that’s going to enable them — which machine, which process, which technology,” he explained.

“We can print things in a three-dimensional format, for example, and we have our CNC machines, where we can take a block of metal or plastic and ‘machine’ everything away, to clear a finished shape.”

He also demonstrates engineering communication tools, such as computer-aided design, digital prototyping and assembly-analysis tools, and he teaches the required lab safety session.

“From that point, students in teams of three or four start to filter in here. I do not tell these students what their project will be — that’s up to the teacher of the course. What I do is assist them with what’s the best way to achieve the project. They’ll come to me and say, ‘This is what we have to do. Do you have any ideas on how to do it?’ Of course I always say yes, even though I often don’t yet,” Holmes joked.

“Rather than just give them the answer, I try and challenge them: ‘There’s a bunch of opportunities for using technology here; tell me what you think,’” he said.

The student projects vary greatly. Recently, for example, one group worked on designing and building liposuction tools while another team designed a special umbrella for use by people in wheelchairs.

There are three levels in product development, Holmes explained: proof of concept, proof of prototype and proof of product.

“With proof of concept, you put some effort into design and find out if the idea is worth pursuing,” he said.

He estimated that 80-90 percent of the students’ projects are focused on reaching the proof of concept stage. “We’re very much ground-floor in this lab. We do that on a very basic scale here, but always directed to that proof of concept: What do you need to get it to a place where you can make more decisions?”

However, not all the lab work focuses on engineering students’ projects.

The lab partners with other areas of the University. For instance, the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence at the Katz Graduate School of Business occasionally needs engineering help to develop a product.

The lab also engages in some higher-end research work as a consortium member of the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center.

“This country has de-emphasized manufacturing, so many universities also de-emphasized it as an academic issue,” Kuhn said. “That’s reversing now. You see more and more universities jumping on it. In a way, that’s why I came back here. I saw an opportunity to inject manufacturing here again and that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

Holmes said, “I feel I’ve done my job if these kids can go out into the real world and in an engineering environment and develop a product or manufacture something. They have a baseline set of skills that will enable them to be immediately productive.”

—Peter Hart