America Makes Puts Defense and Aerospace at the Center of Its 2026 Ambassador Class

America Makes named nine new Ambassadors and presented its 2026 Distinguished Collaborator Award at the institute's Members Meeting and Exchange, held August 4-5 in Youngstown. The 2026 class carries a noticeably different tone from previous years: defense and aerospace are the dominant themes, and that says as much about where additive manufacturing is heading commercially as it does about the individuals selected.

Who Made the 2026 Class

The ambassador cohort spans government, industry, and academia. From the defense and government side, Benjamin Ewing, Senior Principal Manufacturing Engineer in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, joins the class, as does Vijay Madi, Program Manager in the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at Air Force Materiel Command. Anil Chaudry, Principal Scientist at Applied Optimization, also enters from the industrial base support side.

Aerospace and energy suppliers account for three more selections. Greg Colvin, Technical Fellow at Honeywell Aerospace, and Eric Fodran, Fellow for Additive Manufacturing and Emerging Programs at Northrop Grumman, represent two of the primes that have driven the most qualification work on flight-critical printed hardware. Tad Steinberg, who handles AM business development for the Americas at Siemens Energy, rounds out the industrial contingent.

Hardware and research are represented by Zac DiVencenzo, President and co-founder of Youngstown-based JuggerBot 3D, and Sandra DeVincent Wolf, Ph.D., Executive Director of both the Manufacturing Futures Institute and the Next Manufacturing Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Distinguished Collaborator Award

The Distinguished Collaborator Award went to Brett Conner, Ph.D., Chief Manufacturing Officer at the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Conner was recognized for work advancing workforce development and manufacturing education alongside America Makes' mission. Notably, SME appears twice on the 2026 roster. Jeannine Kunz, the society's Executive Director and CEO, received an Ambassador Award in the same class. That double recognition is unusual, and it reflects how closely the institute's workforce and education agenda now runs alongside SME's programming.

What This Class Signals About the Industry

The Ambassador Award Program launched in 2017, and each year's class functions as a fairly reliable indicator of where the industry is concentrating investment. The 2026 list tilts heavily toward defense, aerospace, and domestic manufacturing expansion, and that is not an accident. Those are the sectors with the longest qualification timelines and the most at stake in production readiness, and when they commit to additive manufacturing, they pull the rest of the supply chain with them.

The inclusion of JuggerBot 3D is worth calling out separately. A Youngstown startup making the list alongside Honeywell and Northrop Grumman sends a clear signal that America Makes is deliberately supporting domestic manufacturing expansion and not just rewarding established players. For a region that has been rebuilding its manufacturing base, that kind of recognition matters.

John Wilczynski, Executive Director of America Makes, framed the awards as a reflection of the membership rather than the institute itself. The point is fair: across nine ambassadors, the group genuinely represents the cross-section of organizations that are actually shipping qualified, production-ready AM parts today. Whether that continues to skew toward defense and aerospace or broadens in future years will say a lot about how far additive manufacturing has penetrated beyond those initial strongholds.