The WearLife Performance CRCp will be officially launched at the Copper to the World Conference on June 27th at the Adelaide Convention Centre. LaserBond, Boart Longyear and the University of South Australia are partners in the Commonwealth business funded Cooperative Research Centre Programme (CRCp) that supports industry-led collaboration between industry, researchers and the community. Dr. Christiane Schulz is a coatings development engineer currently working with a leading international advanced materials manufacturer where she developed novel metallurgical coatings for oil and gas, agriculture, food automotive, marine, pulp, paper and steel manufacturing industries. Prior to that, Christiane managed industrial research collaborations and lectured at the prestigious Surface Engineering Institute at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Christiane is being engaged by the University of South Australia as a coatings expert for the CRCp. In her “2007 – 2009 gap year” she spent 17 months in Australia and is very keen to return. Dr Thomas Schlafer presently works with a highly regarded coating system supplier where he is head of R&D. He is responsible for the development of application oriented metallic, cermet and ceramic thermal spray coatings. As Christiane, he too worked at RWTH Aachen University in the field of thermal spraying before changing to industry. Thomas is heavily involved in applications systems development. Thomas is being employed by LaserBond as Manager – R&D Projects, where he will divide time between the CRCp and the development of the advanced manufacturing 16kW LaserBond Cladding cell. Christiane and Thomas bring fresh skills and highly-regarded credentials to the already talented team based in North Adelaide. Gregory Hooper, founder of LaserBond recently met them again at the International Thermal Spray conference in Dusseldorf, Germany where they presented technical papers. He was impressed with the reputation that they had within that industry research community together with their knowledge, experience and desire to come join our team. “I’m excited to be expanding our knowledge and passion, taking what we developed at LaserBond over the past 25 years to the next level, with new applications, new materials, and new technologies, all here in Adelaide. Ultimately a globally recognised wear life research centre and advanced additive manufacturing cluster.” Greg said. “We are all looking forward to welcoming them at the end of August”.