Anthony Caruso serves as Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives, Curators’ Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, and Founder of the Missouri Institute for Defense & Energy at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Most recently, Anthony initiated the Critical Materials Crossroads (CMC), an entity dedicated to building critical materials production capacity in the Kansas City region in the name of economic and national security. In an industry traditionally dominated by cheap labor and small margins, turning to the tools of digitization is one of the important measures to become a globally competitive manufacturing ecosystem.