Birth, Growth and Future of Construction-Scale 3D Printing
MIE Department Seminar
September 4, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM America/Chicago
Presenter: Berok Khoshnevis, PhD, University of Southern California
Location: ERF 3041
Abstract: While thousands of new inventions are made yearly, disruptive technologies emerge infrequently. It typically takes many years to make breakthrough impacts, and this often leads to a stream of changes to the practices in the related application domains. This presentation provides an overview of construction 3D printing technology, its history, and its future journey as experienced and contemplated by the speaker, who pioneered the technology three decades ago. What began as a curiosity case has now evolved into a promising entirely new industry in the important field of construction.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Berok Khoshnevis is Louise L. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California. Through his inventive research activities, Khoshnevis has made many useful inventions and innovations in different domains including robotics, biomedical, oil and gas, renewable energy, fabrication, construction, and space systems. His automated construction invention, Contour Crafting, is the pioneering construction-scale 3D printing technology and is regarded as a promising approach for planetary construction of human outposts. NASA awarded Contour Crafting the Grand Prize among 1000+ globally competing technologies in 2014. In 2016, another invention of Khoshnevis, SSS, received the top NASA prize in another international competition on in-space fabrication technologies. He was recognized in 2017 by the Connected World magazine as one of ten academic pioneers in the Internet of Things (IoT). He is a member of National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, and a fellow of NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. He is also the founder of Contour Crafting Corporation (CC Corp), the first funded company in the construction 3D printing domain. In 2023, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) chose CC Corp to receive its highest Industry Innovation Award.
Date posted
Aug 27, 2025
Date updated
Sep 9, 2025