“Ceramic processing is an ancient art but a young applied science.”¹

When Alfred University Emeritus Professor of Ceramic Engineering James S. Reed wrote these words in 1995, it had been only 10 years since Engineering Ceramics was established as a formal Division of The American Ceramic Society. Even now, more than 30 years later, ceramics manufacturing remains an area ripe with potential to develop solutions that optimize every aspect of the fabrication process, from minimizing energy requirements to enhancing structural control to reducing the number of processing steps.