Thomas Boland is a Professor in the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering and director of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. With an adjunct appointment as Professor at the Texas Tech University Foster School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in ChemE from the University of Washington in 1995 and was a postdoc at in Materials Science at the Penn State and at the NRL. Thomas' research interests are applying engineering principles to automate and build structures with that show biological function. He has received numerous awards and was featured on CNN and the Discovery Channel for his ground braking innovations using inkjet printers to assemble cells and biomaterials