Highlights
- ASU is one of eight universities selected to lead The Foundry School, a federal initiative announced by Vice President J.D. Vance in Washington, D.C.
- The program will run 17 sessions taught by founders and CEOs from advanced manufacturing enterprises across five countries.
- ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, the largest engineering school in the country with nearly 33,000 students, anchors the university's participation.
- Stanford, Ohio State, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Kansas round out the eight-university cohort.
Arizona State University is one of eight universities selected to anchor The Foundry School, a U.S. Department of State initiative developed in partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor to train engineers, entrepreneurs and industrial leaders for advanced manufacturing roles. Vice President J.D. Vance announced the program in Washington, D.C., alongside ASU President Michael Crow, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, and other university presidents.
The program will run 17 sessions across the eight participating universities, each taught by founders and CEOs drawn from advanced manufacturing enterprises in the United States, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Taiwan and India. Session topics span materials, precision production, automation, supply chains, factory economics and industrial leadership.
ASU's role centers on the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, which enrolls nearly 33,000 students and is described in the announcement as the largest engineering school in the country. The School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks, housed in the 173,000-square-foot ISTB12 facility on ASU's Polytechnic campus, is the operational core of ASU's contribution, training students for roles in aerospace, microelectronics, medical devices, energy and related sectors.
Kyle Squires, dean of the Fulton Schools, pointed to the curriculum's emphasis on connecting design decisions to downstream manufacturing outcomes. "Decisions made early in a design show up much later, in tooling, in yield and in whether a product can be manufactured at scale," Squires said. "Teaching engineers to see that whole system is what our faculty do, and this partnership puts our students and emerging builders alongside the practitioners who solve those problems for a living."
Stanford University played a key role in creating The Foundry School. The other six universities are Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, Penn State, Georgia Tech and the University of Kansas.
The announcement was corroborated by ASU News and PR Newswire. The first of the 17 sessions has not yet been publicly scheduled.
Sources
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- aztechcouncil.org retrieved 14/09/2026 21:23
Authored by The Scottsdale Signal. Drafted by AI from primary-source material under our beat-specific editorial guides; reviewed by humans before publish under our five-gate process. Sources retrieved at 14/09/2026 21:23. Every claim traces to a source.
