Melissa Orme delivers her 2023 commencement speech (Photo/Courtesy of USC Viterbi)
For USC Viterbi School of Engineering alumna Melissa Orme, pushing herself is the norm. Whether designing parts for helicopters, developing life-saving medical instrumentation, or raising two USC doctoral candidates, she thrives on embracing challenges.
“Everything that I’ve done career-wise, from the transition from academia to executive technical roles in small startups to large corporate leadership positions, has always been with the thought that the next thing I do must be harder than what I’ve been doing. And I have to learn something new in the new role,” said Orme, who delivered the 2023 commencement address to USC Viterbi master’s students. “Each change in my career has been one that causes me to grow; it has pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn something new. The way I live my life is by continuously learning, because if you’re not learning, you’re not growing, and if you’re not growing, you’re basically not living.”
Orme is the vice president of additive manufacturing at Boeing, a sector that works with 3-D printing on an industrial scale, allowing for the construction of complex metal or polymer components from the ground up, rather than machine the parts out of larger blocks of material, as is done traditionally. Over the years, her impact has sent waves across the industry through revolutionary projects, such as creating a fully 3-D printed satellite enhanced with solar panels. As a result, Orme was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor in engineering.
“What’s interesting about elected academy members is that election is not only connected to their most recent job, rather they are elected based on their contributions over their entire career,” she said. “The election honors and finds value in what I’ve done at the university to my work at the small high-tech start-up companies, to my current work producing additively manufactured components at scale at Boeing. It’s really the biggest professional accomplishment that I can have.”
Orme started her journey at USC Viterbi after entering as a transfer student from UC San Diego. She went on to graduate with three degrees from USC Viterbi; a Bachelor of Science, a master’s degree and a doctorate, all in aerospace engineering.
Orme loved USC.
“I felt like the USC faculty really cared about me. I wasn’t a number in a sea of faces in the classroom. They were there to support me, and they nurtured and mentored me,” she said. “The chair at the time said, ‘You should meet this other professor, he’s got a lab, and he’s looking for somebody to help them.’ And I immediately started lab work my first week as an undergraduate student.”
That same professor, the late Phillip Muntz, worked with Orme from her junior year all the way through to her Ph.D.
Orme and additive manufacturing
As Orme began her college education, the idea of additive manufacturing was just that: an idea. At the time, Orme was developing a liquid droplet radiator that allowed her to control and manipulate small oil droplets in a vacuum environment for the application of thermal control in space.
By the time she had become a doctoral student, additive manufacturing had finally become a reality thanks to one of the early inventors, Chuck Hull. Working at a company that used UV light to harden tabletop coatings, Hull would prototype plastic parts that then would be injected into a mold. A laborious and tedious process, he knew there must be a better way. Using stereolithography, a term coined by Hull which describes the process of using UV light to build parts up from a vat of resin, Hull founded 3D Systems.
After a visit to Hull’s studio in Valencia, California, Orme launched into a new career trajectory. For her, the idea of continuing her graduate work but pivoting to the application to 3D printing excited her. She designed an experimental apparatus that allowed her to generate, control and deposit molten metal droplets onto a substrate with great precision and accuracy to create a 3D part.
“It’s pushing the boundaries of what we can do now,” said Orme. “What I really look forward to is being able to increase the stakeholder’s trust in additive manufacturing. I think it’s my job to create and instill that trust because it’s still relatively new.”
Old excerpt from a USC newspaper on Orme’s work at USC (Photo/Courtesy of Melissa Orme)
Since her student days, Orme has spent time as a tenured professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Irvine, relocated to Greece where she worked with her husband to continue to develop 3-D ultrasound breast cancer detection technology, returned to the US and worked in high-tech start-ups and finally landed in her current role at Boeing. Through all of this, however, she continues to innovate in an industry that she has always found intriguing. Orme said she looks forward to the next challenge, which is guaranteed to push her out of her comfort zone and entail a great deal of learning, whatever it is.
The Trojan Family
Orme knows she wouldn’t have found such success without her Trojan Family – and not just those who share her genes.
“There was just so much support. I was doing really interesting work, there was great camaraderie with the other graduate students and with my advisor,” she said. “I felt very welcome, very valued, and I was just extremely excited about contributing to this new field.”
Over time, Orme would come to embody what the Trojan Family truly means. Her husband, Vasilis Marmarelis, is a USC Viterbi professor of biomedical engineering. Her two sons, Myrl and Zissis Marmarelis, both received undergraduate degrees from the Viterbi School of Engineering. Myrl recently completed his doctoral thesis in Viterbi’s computer science program and now shares the designation of “Dr. Marmarelis” with his father. Zissis is completing his doctorate at Price School of Public Policy, which he expects to complete within the year.
“Once a Trojan, you’re always going to be connected with the Trojan Family,” said Orme, a current member of USC Viterbi’s Corporate Advisory Board. “That amazing support system will never let you down.”
Published on August 14th, 2024
Last updated on August 14th, 2024
