Over the last six years of its operation, ISM has been continuing to make excellent progress with our overall mission of conducting academic research (basic and applied), offering educational programs, developing new and innovative sustainable manufacturing technologies, and providing outreach to industry with technology transfer. With our focus on products, processes and systems aspects of manufacturing, ISM faculty and researchers are in the forefront of research and applications, working on a variety of sponsored projects in our research laboratories.

We are continuing to exceed our expectations in research productivity with increased funding, research publications, graduate student productivity and industry outreach activities. Highlights of our achievements include:

• Developing strong industry interactions and partnerships with major companies such as United Technology Research Center (UTRC), GE Aviation, Toyota and Lexmark International. We also continue our interactions with several US universities and national labs. Our recent multi-million-dollar research projects include collaborations with those industry partners and research agencies such as Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII), Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (LIFT), Department of Energy (DoE) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We look forward to future opportunities for strategic partnership for large proposals at the national level.
• Successfully organizing and conducting the annual series of ISM International Forum on Sustainable Manufacturing. Our 6^th ISM Forum was recently held in Lexington, KY in December 2017, which was attended by more than 80 participants from industry, academia and government organizations.
• We are currently organizing the 16^th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing (GCSM) to be held in Lexington, KY in October 2018. This major international event will be hosted in collaboration with Technical University of Berlin and Fraunhofer IPK (Germany). We are expecting over 200 local and international participants representing academia, industry, government and agencies to attend this signature conference in the area of sustainable manufacturing. This conference includes keynote presentations by international researchers on emerging topics in plenary sessions, parallel paper sessions in numerous topical areas of sustainable manufacturing, a dedicated industry session showcasing sustainable manufacturing practices by industry groups and a panel discussion with experts on advancing Circular Economy (CE).
• We currently offer an Online Masters Degree Program in Manufacturing Systems Engineering, focusing on sustainable manufacturing, with numerous courses covering products, processes and systems aspects of manufacturing. Our enrollment has increased significantly during the last few years.
• ISM faculty continues to expand our international research collaboration with researchers from Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Turkey and United Kingdom. New researchers from Germany, Sweden, China and Turkey joined our ISM research groups at the University of Kentucky this year to conduct collaborative research in new project areas.

I invite you to explore this website to see the work done at the ISM laboratories, and to develop new partnerships with us.

I. S. Jawahir, Director, ISM