From dam builder to global 'Digi-Neer'

By her own admission, Carolyn Conner Seepersad grew up in the 'middle of nowhere' - a hamlet tucked away in the mountains of West Virginia. Not exactly a promising start for an engineer in today's digital era.

But where there are mountains, there are invariably streams and rivers, and young Carolyn got her start building makeshift dams, to the occasional chagrin of the schools of salmon downstream.

Still, it took more than 'sticks and stones' to have propelled her from the rural South to her current position of professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

There, in the digital capital of the desert West, Dr Conner Seepersad is on the leading edge of additive manufacturing, known in layman's circles as 3D printing.

major impact

By whatever label, the process is already having a major impact on several spheres of life. In this process, plastic (most often used) or another material is heated to liquid form. The liquid is then extruded on to a platform (think of frosting being piped into shapes on a cake) in accordance with a digital file that represents the object to be fabricated. This may be as basic as a key ring, or as complex as dental braces, customised just for you, or even replacement parts for automobiles and - wait for it - human bodies.

Dr Conner Seepersad displayed a number of items fabricated via 3D printing by her Texas students, while visiting Kingston for the 2013 instalment of the TEDx Jamaica talks, where she was one of several live presenters. The process, she points out, has many intrinsic advantages for Jamaica, as indeed for other economies.

"There's far less wastage of raw materials," she explains adding, "you also eliminate the need for moulds, which, in many cases, might be used once and then discarded and are not always as accurate as this process."

Though not intimately aware of the vagaries of the Jamaican economy, Dr Seepersad is a devotee of Jamaican art, among other things, and has visited Jamaica several times with her Trinidadian husband. Thus, her east-to-west professional journey has a neat (if not expected) Caribbean twist. She's excited to to return here and to increase her familiarity with the island, and, in particular, with the food.

A passionate home cook, Dr Conner Seepersad lists entertaining friends and reading as two of the ways to add variety to her fulfilling-but-demanding job, and also facilitates spending time with her husband and their two children.