Jarred Heigel graduated from Penn State in 2015 with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, where he studied the thermal and mechanical response of metal parts during additive manufacturing processing. Before grad school, Heigel worked as a contractor with th National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researching metal cutting processes; specifically how to measure the process to provide more accurate data to validate model predictions. See papers Heigel has co-authored here.