Dr. Jan Helge Bøhn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Director of the Virginia Tech Computer Aided Design Laboratory, the Director of the Rapid Prototyping Laboratory, and the principal investigator for the PACE program at Virginia Tech.

He has been working in the area of rapid prototyping and layered manufacturing since 1990, including software, hardware, and materials development for high-performance fabrication using fused deposition modeling (FDM) systems with fiber composites and soft elastomers. In the area of software engineering, his focus has been on software integration of modeling, design, and analysis systems for power electronics and aircraft conceptual design, Six Sigma in software
engineering, and on automated conversion of legacy FORTRAN code into object-oriented C++.

Dr. Bøhn has taught the course ME 4644 Introduction to Rapid Prototyping since 1995. This is a regular 3-credit senior technical elective, approved for graduate credit, and it is the first university course of its kind, anywhere, dedicated to the topic of rapid prototyping. He also
developed a fully automated online introductory course on object-oriented C++ programming, complete with online submissions and automated grading of programming assignments in a structured, collaborative environment. This course has a yearly enrollment of about 600 students that generate nearly 15,000 homework submissions that are automatically graded. Finally, he team-teaches an award-winning transatlantic course on global collaborative engineering and
product data management with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reiner Anderl at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.

Dr. Bøhn has a B.S. in Computer Science, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer and Systems Engineering, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, U.S.A. Prior employments include the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, Philips Laboratories, Sun Microsystems, and General Electric Corporate Research & Development.