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The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center is expanding efforts to ensure its future highly skilled workforce is homegrown in Huntsville.
Huntsville City Schools celebrated CCDC AvMC's growing support of the school system's career technical programs in a partnership recognition ceremony Feb. 28 at the Grissom High School Advanced Manufacturing Lab in Huntsville. Superintendent Christie Finley thanked AvMC Executive Director Dr. Juanita M. Christensen for the center's increased financial backing as the leaders reaffirmed their organizations' commitment to supporting STEM education and the Warfighter.
"We are thankful for this extension in our partnership and look forward, most importantly, to seeing our students benefit from it," Finley said.
AvMC has an active educational partnership agreement with Huntsville City Schools. Originally signed in 2013, it was updated in 2016 to include additive manufacturing and composites, with a goal of developing and maturing science, technology and engineering talent in the Huntsville area. This effort expands that partnership to include facets of advanced manufacturing, such as modeling and simulation, automation/robotics, machine tools and metrology, as well as offering additive manufacturing curriculum in the middle school grades. AvMC's core technical competencies depend upon a preeminent, multidisciplinary, adaptive workforce that conducts leading-edge research, development and life cycle engineering, while promoting discovery and innovation across government, academia and industry.
"The Aviation & Missile Center's aviation and missile system designs of tomorrow will be the most complex and technology laden iterations ever produced," Christensen said. "Advanced manufacturing will serve as a key enabler to ensure these essential capabilities are developed in an effective and affordable manner. Critical to the Army's future success is the development of a workforce with a strong foundation in advanced manufacturing principles. Insertion of such education at the middle and high school level is essential to recruit and maintain the best of tomorrow's workforce."
Jamie White, aviation manufacturing technology branch chief for AvMC, spearheaded the effort to expand the partnership, seeing an opportunity to help students, while "strategically guiding them with regard to the Aviation & Missile Center's personnel needs, technologies of interest, and industry's long-term investment strategy." The effort leverages other existing partnerships with the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining, Calhoun Community College, Auburn University, the University of Alabama-Huntsville and NASA.
"The proposed growth of the existing Aviation & Missile Center partnership with Huntsville City Schools enables the organization to not only cultivate tomorrow's scientific and engineering expertise, but does so locally, encouraging that talent to consider a career supporting the Army's aviation and missile communities within the greater Huntsville area," White said. "Undertaking this effort ensures the Army and the Aviation & Missile Center's technology needs are kept at the forefront of educators' minds as they equip tomorrow's engineers and scientists to solve the nation's most difficult problems."
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The CCDC Aviation & Missile Center, formerly known as the Aviation & Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC), is part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, which conducts responsive research, development and life cycle engineering to deliver the aviation and missile capabilities the Army depends on to ensure victory on the battlefield today and tomorrow. Through collaboration across the command's core technical competencies, CCDC leads in the discovery, development and delivery of the technology-based capabilities required to make Soldiers more lethal to win our nation's wars and come home safely. CCDC is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Futures Command.
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