LEM21

Prof. Sung-Hoon Ahn

President of KSPE
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea

EASIER: Appropriate Smart Manufacturing and Robotics

Biography:
Professor Sung-Hoon Ahn is a distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University and the 30th President of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering (KSPE). He specializes in smart materials, soft robotics, and smart manufacturing, and leads both the Innovative Design and Integrated Manufacturing Lab and the Institute of Advanced Machines and Design. Dr. Ahn received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1997 and has published over 320 journal papers with more than 28,000 citations (Google H-Index 80). He is recognized for his pioneering work on human-robot interaction and integrated manufacturing systems, is a Fellow of CIRP, Head of International Cooperation at the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, Associate Member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea, and Fellow of the Academic Society for Appropriate Technology.

Prof. Burak Sencer

Conference co-chair of the ASME MSEC 2027 (co-located with LEM&P 2027 at OSU)
Associate Professor, School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University (OSU), USA

Self-Optimizing Machine Tools: Advancing Speed, Stability, and Accuracy

Biography:
Dr. Sencer received his MS and PhD degrees from the University of British Columbia under Prof. Yusuf Altintas in 2009, followed by a JSPS post-doctoral fellowship at Nagoya University under Prof. Eiji Shamoto. He is currently Associate Professor at OSU, where his laboratory focuses on machine tool dynamics and control, machining, process control, and robotics. He has secured over $10M in research grants as PI/co-PI, published more than 100 refereed papers, and received awards including best paper prizes from JSPE and the ASME Blackall Machine Tool and Gage Award. He has held leadership positions at ASME and ASPE, and will co-chair the ASME MSEC 2027 conference at OSU.

Prof. Berend Denkena

President of CIRP (2024-2025)
Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW), Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

Driving sustainability through advanced manufacturing research

Biography:
Berend Denkena is the full-time Institute Director and Chair of Production Engineering and Machine Tools at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany. Denkena is a trained machinist and a mechanical engineer. In 1992, after completing his doctorate in Hannover, he went into the machine tool industry as a design engineer and later head of various research and development teams in Germany and the USA. From 1996 to 2001, Denkena headed product development and engineering at GILDEMEISTER Turning Machines, now part of the DMG MORI Group. In 2002, after ten exciting years in industry, he returned to the University in the above-mentioned position. Denkena is an enthusiastic scientist, inventor and developer of machine tools and related technologies. His passion belongs to innovative concepts for machine tools including their further development towards more autonomy as well as future tools and manufacturing processes, and solutions for a more sustainable manufacturing. Denkena is a Member of the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP), the German Academic Association for Production Technology (wgp) and the National Academy of Science and Technology (acatech).

Dr. Yasusuke Iwashita

Executive Engineer, FANUC Corporation, Japan

High efficiency of design and process of machine tool using CNC Digital Twin

Biography:
Dr. Iwashita has been engaged in the research and commercialization of CNC control systems for general machine tools, as well as servo and spindle motor control at FANUC since graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1986. He has contributed to the development of high-speed, high-precision machining technologies through servo system design and machine tool feed axis control. He received his PhD in 2019 for research on machine characteristics measurement and servo control. Currently, he works on advanced CNC command generation for 5-axis and multi-tasking machines, and is developing CNC digital twin technologies integrating servo system models for realistic machine tool simulation.