Dr Sami Kara is a Professor within the School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering at UNSW Sydney. He founded and heads up the Sustainable Manufacturing & Life Cycle Engineering Research Group at UNSW (LCE@UNSW) and, with fellow UNSW Professor Christoph Herrmann, co-directs the Joint German-Australian Research Group (JGARG) ‘Sustainable Manufacturing and Life Cycle Management’. An engineer with a PhD in manufacturing, Dr Kara has three-plus decades’ experience across industry, research and tertiary education. He held engineering and management roles in manufacturing companies across Australia and the world before joining UNSW’s academic staff in 2000. Since then, Prof. Kara has completed numerous projects, most industry-driven, spanning product reuse and recycling; product and process energy use and eco-efficiency; and product life-cycle assessment and costing, for applications including nanotechnologies and composite materials. Prof. Kara has particular interests in life-cycle engineering – sustainability, energy and resource efficiency in manufacturing; end-of-life product management; life-cycle design; design for disassembly; eco-design; logistics and reverse supply chains; environmental impact assessment and cleaner production; and additive manufacturing, or AM – design and process design for AM, energy and resource efficiency in AM, rapid prototyping, 3D printing, laser sintering and stereolithography. Prof. Kara is a member of Engineers Australia and a Fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP).
