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Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at SPEE3D thought the National Industry PhD Program (NIPP) was such a good idea that he enrolled in a PhD to join the program. He balances a busy role at a growing company with the academic discipline of completing a PhD, while finding ways not just to innovate in science but how he studies his PhD.
Innovating 3D technology – by chance
Steven Camilleri, along with cofounder Byron Kennedy, started metal 3D printing technology company Speed3D 10 years ago. While a lot of 3D printing had focused on softer materials such as plastics, Camilleri and Kennedy saw a need for developing a deployable 3D metal printing technology.
‘It’s fun tech – it's a fun field to be in,’ said Camilleri of his focus. ‘Being metals they are much more industrially focused than other parts of the 3D printing industry. So the stuff needs to work and be able to do its job.’
SPEE3D’s systems are around the size of a light truck, making them easy to deploy to where they are needed such as for defence applications. The company has several systems in commercial use, including 10 systems deployed on the front line in Ukraine.
SPEE3D was founded almost by accident. While working and studying at Charles Darwin University (CDU) in the early 2000s, the pair became involved in the World Solar Car Challenge, which led to them developing a type of electric motor. ‘I can pretty much build an EV from scratch,’ said Camilleri of his electrical engineering background. They then formed In Motion Technologies, a CDU spinout company to further the motor design. The company was then acquired by Regal Beloit Corporation.
The pair continued to work for Regal Beloit, with Camilleri serving as R&D Manager. Regal Beloit asked both cofounders to learn more about manufacturing to help solve problems their manufacturing team was working on. Camilleri and Kennedy spent several years learning about manufacturing, completing GE manufacturing.
After a few years of working for Regal Deloitte, Camilleri and Kennedy encountered a problem: metal parts were hard to get. 'As people who are curious, we thought maybe there’s a technology solution here. 3D printing was just starting to become more common, but nobody wanted to work with us on the idea of developing and manufacturing a version of 3D printing technology for metal,’ said Camilleri.
That led to the cofounders quitting their jobs and starting SPEE3D.
Ideal collaboration for the National Industry PhD Program
Professor Kannoorpatti Krishnan is a research professor for advanced manufacturing at Charles Darwin University. His team has been collaborating with SPEE3D for around 5 years in the materials scientist and metallurgist areas. When Professor Kannoorpatti heard about the NIPP, he was excited.
‘This is a great scheme to attract people from industry to work with the university,’ said Professor Kannoorpatti. ‘It’s a unique scheme for Australia and people from the US were actually surprised it is happening here. I’m grateful the Government has come up with this scheme and is also incentivizing people who are already doing research to get recognition from the academic community.’
Professor Kannoorpatti felt the NIPP would be ideal for SPEED3D. ‘I thought it was a great opportunity because of the kind of research Steven and his colleagues were doing, and I said, this is really worthy of a PhD,’ he said. ‘It was pretty easy as the research they do every day is actually of PhD quality.’
Camillieri was immediately onboard with the idea of an NIPP project. ‘I thought it was a brilliant idea,’ said Camillieri. ‘It’s compelling in structure and getting people who are doing research anyway to think about getting it blessed by the academic community.’
Camillieri was so supportive of the program that he decided to sign up to do a PhD himself. ‘I wanted to demonstrate to the rest of the organisation that this was something I was happy to support,’ he said. ‘So what better way to do it than to sign up myself.
Turning work into a PhD
Camilleri’s academic background was originally as an electronics engineer, and he has a Master’s degree in power electronics. But for the past 10 years, he has been working – and innovating – in the field of industrial manufacturing.
‘Materials science is about experiment, test and evaluation, hypothesis and data collection – even when you are doing relatively normal stuff. I’d always found that attractive as a field and I was watching Professor Kannoorpatti and what he does and thought it was pretty cool. I thought that seems like the obvious topic for me.’
‘Most of the people I work with in the industry already assume I have a material science PhD or postgraduate qualifications. I’ve never said I have those qualifications, but people assume I do because of the way I speak about things. We are doing a lot of the type of work that would get you a PhD normally anyway.’
‘You’ve got these systems in material science that are incredibly complex, that you couldn’t possibly hope to model or understand completely with simple methodologies. And you need to learn large body of knowledge to navigate that space successfully.’
Cofounder and PhD student
And what about being both a cofounder of the industry partner and a PhD student?
While Camilleri has managed, co-supervised and co-sponsored PhDs, until now he hasn’t been one himself. ‘It’s very novel from my point of view, and very novel from the university’s point of view as well,’ he said.
Professor Kannoorpatti says the collaboration is working well. ‘Luckily, I have a very friendly team to work with in SPEE3D. The guys have experience in a university, and they know exactly how CDU works, and we get to meet them regularly,’ he said.
Having a cofounder who already had a strong background in the subject matter also meant the research collaboration was not starting from first base. ‘Normally if you have a student coming to do a PhD you have to tell them a lot of things and do quite a bit of training. But we didn’t have to train Steve at all,’ said Professor Kannoorpatti.
A team-based approach
Camillieri said he is approaching his PhD is slightly different than the standard way of doing things – especially as he is working on research as part of a team.
‘It’s hard to keep students motivated and for them to get the results they need. Working on your own on a project that will take years, the type of people who that will really appeal to is not actually a large percentage of society. Actually, most people like working in teams. They like having many goals that shift over time.’
‘In contrast, doing a PhD generally involves going down a rabbit hole and living in that rabbit hole for several years. You don’t come up for light until the end. So, it’s a little at odds with what industry wants, at least in my industry. I really like people who can work well in teams. I like people who can break a problem down and then execute pieces of the problem – and then change direction rapidly if the methodology of hypothesis was wrong. And I think that’s probably not that unusual to want those things in an industrial setting, but the PhD teaches you to laser focus on one thing for years.’
‘Fortunately, we’re doing this anyway in the context of a team. The idea that I’m part of a team is something that doesn’t happen with most PhDs. And that does surprise people at CDU: it’s not just me generating results and writing things up, because it’s a team.’
And while Camilleri, as a cofounder and CTO, has people in his company who can work with him to support his PhD, he stresses this is just how things are normally done in teams. ‘If any of the people working for me or with me were working on PhDs – and indeed some of them are – they get the support of the rest of the team just the same. You don’t say “one research problem per person, come back in 3 years”.
‘We don’t have any problems with motivation getting the research done, as we have very serious commercial goals arounds the research. It’s all mapped out and I’ve got people leaning on me to get things done.’
The research is on rails
The specific project for the collaboration is titled methods for the robust employment of metal additive manufacturing in high-risk industrial applications. Professor Kannoorpatti said the industry/research collaboration was already delivering results and solving industrial problems.
Camillieri agrees, categorising the research results from his work at SPEE3D and collaboration with CDU as solid. ‘The good news is the research is on rails. There’s no issues with that. It’s going to happen, and it’s going to be a high standard,’ he said.
But in a fast-paced industrial environment, sharing the results to the academic community can be a challenge. ‘We’re going to struggle to keep up with the reporting because what is happening is so far ahead of what’s expected by the university,’ said Camillieri.
‘The additional thinking that the PhD is forcing me to do, being more rigorous and the academic instruction, I’m finding very beneficial to the company as well. One of the reasons I am so supportive, is because it is yielding a benefit way beyond a PhD. The PhD is not the end game. We have a feeling that some things are underserved in terms of potential and this is an opportunity to go away and look at it with a larger lens. That’s the real appeal for me.’
Camillieri cites the time needed to complete a PhD as the biggest obstacle for him. He is navigating this by publishing papers regularly. ‘It is almost worth standardizing completing industrialized PhDs this way,’ he said.
‘We are recognizing the work that SPEE3D is already doing and the main thing is to get the work processed in an academic way – and we want to do that by publication so that it’s not a huge burden on Steve as we can break it into chunks and keep publishing,’ said Professor Kannoorpatti.