NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and Scarbo Performance to deliver keynotes at 2025 AMUG Conference
January 16, 2025

The Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) has announced its keynote speakers for the 2025 AMUG Conference, which will be held in Chicago, Illinois, USA, from March 30 – April 3, 2025. Ryan Watkins, a Research Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), will take the stage on Tuesday, April 1, followed by Joe Scarbo, President of Scarbo Performance Corp, on Thursday, April 3.
Watkins’ and Scarbo’s work spans from the Baja Desert to Aspen Mountain to Pikes Peak and extends into the solar system. Their keynote presentations will showcase vehicle designs and space exploration achievements. Through accounts of past and present projects, they will demonstrate how pragmatic decision-making combined with innovation pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with Additive Manufacturing.
Watkins’ keynote presentation will focus on ‘linking design with Additive Manufacturing’ in the context of developing additively manufactured, crushable structures for high-speed impact attenuation applications. He will explain why NASA needed to create this new class of crushable structures and describe how his team overcame manufacturing and design challenges. More significantly, he will share his journey of introducing new technology into the conservative aerospace engineering field, including both successes and failures.
Scarbo will convey how, when, and why his company used Additive Manufacturing in its most recent performance vehicles. Under the Scarbo Vintage (SV) brand, his team has created the SV RSR, which raced in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb as Ken Block’s Hoonipigasus, and the SV Rover, which ran in the Baja 1000. Following the Baja race, the SV Rover transitioned into the world’s first street-legal Hypertruck, powered by a 1,100-horsepower supercharged V8 or a 1,000-horsepower electric drive.
Both SV vehicles feature numerous additively manufactured parts. Throughout his keynote presentation, Scarbo will present his thoughts on why Additive Manufacturing was – or was not – the right process – thoughts that are grounded in his mechanical engineering, welding, machining, and racing pedigrees.

Ryan Watkins
Ryan Watkins joined NASA’s JPL nine years ago after earning a PhD in aerospace engineering. He has worked on flight projects as a structural analyst and cognizant engineer, leading the design, build, test, and integration of launch restraint hardware for NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) and NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) missions.
In his current role as a Research Engineer in the Materials Development & Additive Manufacturing group, Watkins focuses on the integration of advanced materials with computational design, such as topology optimisation, to enable and support future NASA missions. This work includes generalising topology optimisation to complex material systems, additively manufacturing and modelling lattice structures, and Additive Manufacturing shape memory alloy systems. He also works to develop and foster JPL’s topology optimisation capabilities and integrate the requisite workflows into flight project practices.
In December 2024, JPL won 3D Printing Industry Award’s Aerospace, Space, and Defense Application category for Watkins’ work on additively manufactured, crushable lattices. Also in 2024, his software, UnitcellHub, was named JPL’s Software of the Year and was open-sourced to the public.

Joe Scarbo
Joe Scarbo founded Scarbo Performance in 2008 as an engineering consultancy specialising in performance vehicles. In 2013, the company shifted to low-volume manufacturing of motorsport products and complete vehicles. Today, Scarbo Performance Corp includes four businesses that offer design (for both automotive and non-automotive products), performance after-market components, and bespoke vehicle manufacturing. Since its inception, Scarbo Performance has built more than thirty vehicles for other companies.
Scarbo earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering and, while at college, took on a job designing and machining components for the Arciero Racing family. Following on from college, Scarbo went to work as an in-house mechanical design engineer for the Volkswagen Motorsport off-road race programme – Baja racing with the Toureg TDI – and continued to work on elite projects with global leaders.
Attracted to the possibilities of Additive Manufacturing, Scarbo took a position with an Orange County, California, firm that leverages the technology in design and prototyping work for its clients’ projects. That experience opened the door for Scarbo to become director of mechanical design for a consumer electronics company, where he leveraged Additive Manufacturing for design and testing. While the work was interesting and the experience valuable, Scarbo’s passion for motorsports led him to rededicate his time to Scarbo Performance.
Those who wish to register for the event can do so here.