RICHMOND, VA — The Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing named a new president and chief executive officer. William T. Powers III brings successful global leadership experience in the aerospace sector as a board member, CEO and senior financial executive and will focus on CCAM’s manufacturing research mission and continue to build the center’s membership of commercial, academic and public partners.

Powers has been on CCAM’s board of directors since 2010 and was involved in the planning for CCAM as early as 2007.

“Will has been deeply engaged with CCAM from its very start,” said Helmuth Ludwig, chairman of the CCAM Board of Directors. “He brings both proven leadership experience and deep knowledge of the organization and its member universities and companies. This will be vital to continue to grow CCAM’s reputation as the prime advanced manufacturing institute.”

Powers succeeds president and executive director Joseph Moody who retires March 31. Moody was appointed in 2014.

“Joe joined CCAM at a critical time,” said Ludwig. “Under his leadership CCAM more than doubled its research spend and increased the membership by almost 50 percent. The CCAM Board thanks Joe for his leadership and accomplishments.”

Prior to joining CCAM, Powers was the chief financial officer for Rolls-Royce’s North American operations, a $3 billion business with 9,000 employees. He also served as a member of the Rolls-Royce North America Holdings Board and its government security and audit committees. Previous roles with Rolls-Royce included positions based in London serving as the chief executive of Rolls-Royce Capital Limited, and as director of mergers and acquisitions for Rolls-Royce.

The CCAM industry and government consortium now numbers 29 members, including Aerojet Rocketdyne, Airbus, Alcoa, Chromalloy, Newport News Shipbuilding, Oerlikon Metco, Rolls-Royce, Sandvik Coromant, SGS Tool Company, Siemens, Blaser Swisslube, Canon Virginia Inc., EOS, Hermle Machine Co., Mitutoyo, Paradigm Precision, RTI International Metals, Inc., Buehler, Cool Clean Technologies, GF Machining Solutions, Mechdyne, National Instruments, Spatial Integrated Systems (SIS), and the NASA Langley Research Center.

Academic partners are the Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia State University and Virginia Tech.

CCAM is based at a 62,000 square foot facility that has computational and engineering research labs, high bay production space and commercial scale equipment, and specialized equipment and tooling for research in surface engineering, manufacturing systems, additive manufacturing, machining technologies, composite materials processing, and welding and joining. Leveraging the combined strengths and capabilities from CCAM and the network of university, industry, and government partners, CCAM bridges the gap between research and commercialization, accelerating new developments to market.