By: Reegan Ketzenberger, PhD Student, University of Colorado Boulder

As fall begins, the weather shifts, and, for those in academia, the halls are once again overrun by undergraduate students, we reflect fondly on this summer’s 2026 Additive Manufacturing of Soft Materials Gordon Research Conference. For many of us here at PAMA, the conference left our stomachs full of lobster, hearts full of connection, and heads full of inspiration drawn from a full week of exploring leading research in polymer additive manufacturing.

The most recent AM of Soft Materials GRC was held over seven days (July 18th - 24th) at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire. This is the third installment of the AM of Soft Materials GRC/GRS following the 2024 iteration at Bryant University and the inaugural conference in Ventura, California in 2022.

“I have been to every GRC on Additive Manufacturing of Soft Materials, and I have enjoyed them all particularly because we have a great community of researchers working together across the many different disciplines to advance the field. These folks are also a lot of fun.”
– Dr. Alshakim Nelson

Dr. Alshakim Nelson, Department Chair and Job & Gertrude Tamaki Endowed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington, chaired this year’s conference alongside Dr. Callie Higgins, Co-Project Leader of the Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing (PAM) Project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and adjunct faculty at the Colorado School of Mines.

Saturday and Sunday featured the Gordon Research Seminar portion of the conference which is tailored towards early career researchers. This year’s GRS was chaired by Anthony Griffin, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and Garvit Nayyar, a 5th year PhD candidate at the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing at Arizona State University. 

Participants of the Gordon Research Seminar, July 18-19, 2026

“Outside of the lobster, my favorite part of the conference was seeing scientists from different backgrounds and career stages come together to discuss critical aspects of additive manufacturing, ranging from key challenges, next steps, and the impact of automation and artificial intelligence. The range of disciplines and expertise represented at the conference made for a particularly valuable exchange of ideas.”
– Dr. Anthony Griffin, GRS Co-Chair

In total, the conference welcomed 140 attendees including 54 faculty members, 57 graduate students and academic postdocs, 17 national lab representatives, and 12 industry representatives from companies exploring 3D printing the human lung (3D systems) to creating additively manufactured art (Nervous System) and commercializing VAM technology (Manifest Technologies). 49 universities from 12 countries around the world were represented. Boulder, Colorado - home of Radtech’s Photopolymer Fundamentals workshop - alone sent 11 individuals from the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. An undisclosed number of Eiffel Towers and gyroid lattices were also featured over the course of 9 incredible rounds of talks covering recent work in direct ink writing, photopolymer AM, and more. A full agenda and list of speakers is available at the 2026 Additive Manufacturing of Soft Materials Conference GRC Website.

Conference session topics

“Within the light-based additive manufacturing community, the focus is noticeably shifting away from baseline process benchmarks, such as printing speed and spatial resolution, toward solving application-driven challenges with real industrial and clinical value. Translating these laboratory breakthroughs into viable manufacturing processes makes reproducibility a critical challenge, requiring an in-depth understanding of curing kinetics combined with in-situ diagnostics, optical monitoring, and machine learning to enable closed-loop feedback and establish reliable processing standards. Ultimately, the most vital driver going forward will be cross-disciplinary collaboration among chemists, optical engineers, material scientists, and clinicians to translate promising photochemistry into dependable engineering materials,” says Julian Fanelli, poster session award winner and second-year PhD student in the School of Chemistry and Physics and the Centre for Materials Science at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

The Gordon Research Conference is unique in that it promotes networking and cross-disciplinary collaboration through a single-stream format where all participants attend the same talks and poster sessions and even eat meals and engage in recreational activities together. Examples of this include the legendary lobster dinner pictured below (left) and the optional break-time brewery tour (right).

 

“I do wholeheartedly believe that every graduate student should experience a GRC conference at least once. There is no comparison to how valuable the whole concept and layout of a GRC is especially for students. It gives graduate students an opportunity to learn from the leaders and reflect on their own journeys and how they can improve.”
– Garvit Nayyar, GRS Co-Chair

Nate Gangelhoff, poster session award winner and first-year PhD student in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah also remembers this summer’s GRC as an uplifting experience. “Without a doubt, the sense of community was the best part of the conference. The smaller attendee size made a lineup of top-tier researchers remarkably approachable, giving everyone a genuine opportunity to get to know people, discuss research and build lasting professional connections. Especially seeing the GRS cohort go from complete strangers on the first day to a cohesive, collaborative network was a fantastic experience. Borrowing my group mate's words: that was the single best nerd thing I have ever done” he says.

Nate will co-chair the next AM of Soft Materials GRS alongside Elisabeth Recker and is hoping to add a dedicated social event and broaden industry participation saying, “If you're in the industry and curious about the GRS, please reach out”. The next AM of Soft Materials GRC will be chaired by Dr. Johanna Schwartz, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore’s Materials Science Division, and Dr. Brett G. Compton, Stewart McCorkle Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“Let's keep pushing the field! I look forward to hearing about what everyone is excited about most at the next meeting.”
– Dr. Alshakim Nelson