Susan Smyth, Ph.D.
Bio
Title of the Talk
"The Future of Manufacturing in the 21st Century"
Date: March 15, 2016
The Nathan Bisk College of Business welcomed Susan Smyth to campus in March 2016 for the F. Alan Smith Visiting Executive Talk Series.
Smyth, chief scientist for global manufacturing and director of the R&D Manufacturing Systems Research Lab at General Motors, offered, “The Future of Manufacturing in the 21st Century.”
In her role at GM, Smyth directs the creation of GM’s global advanced manufacturing strategies and oversees innovation and implementation of its advanced manufacturing portfolio.
Susan Smyth, PhD, is the chief scientist for global manufacturing at General Motors and director of the GM R&D Manufacturing Systems Research Lab. In this capacity, Smyth directs the creation of GM’s global advanced manufacturing strategies and oversees innovation and implementation of its advanced manufacturing portfolio. She has aggressively grown GM’s global collaboration footprint in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Korea and China. These collaborations have yielded internal and external recognitions.
Smyth began her career with General Motors as a senior project engineer with the Advanced Engineering staff. Since then, she has held a variety of leadership positions in manufacturing, quality, strategic business planning and R&D. In addition to being an SME International Director since 2012, Smyth is chair of the Technology Leadership Council for Manufacturing at the United States Council for Automotive Research; the GM executive representative for environmental technology at USCAR; a member of North-western’s MMM Executive Governance Council; executive advisor to Tennenbaum Institute and Georgia Tech’s Manufacturing Institute; and director of Collaborative Research Laboratories at the University of Michigan, MIT and Shanghai Jiao-Tong University, China. She has a bachelor’s in physics, a master’s in optoelectronics and information technology, and a doctorate in physics from the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
