Sarah Boisvert
Sarah Boisvert has over 30 years' experience that bridges workforce training and advanced manufacturing.
Ms. Boisvert is a co-founder of Potomac Photonics, Inc. of Baltimore MD, which she joined to commercialize a proprietary RF-discharge Excimer laser. There she moved the company into the laser machine tool business with a contract service job shop. She developed in-house training programs since at that time formal programs didn’t exist in these fields for laser operators and technicians.
Following the sale of the company in 1999, Ms. Boisvert founded Fab Lab Hub, part of the Fab Lab Network based at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, in order to foster entrepreneurship, STEM education and workforce training in digital fabrication manufacturing skills. In Santa Fe, NM, she operates two Fab Labs that offer Digital Badges, paid internships and entrepreneur-in-residence programs, while providing contract manufacturing services in the biotech, jewelry, art, medical device and microfluidics industries. She founded the New Collar Network with ten other fab labs in order to bring digital badges to education organizations in North America.
Partially funded by Verizon, in 2016 Ms. Boisvert conducted a study into digital skills needed for operators and technicians in manufacturing. She interviewed 200 companies ranging in size from startups to Fortune 100 multi-nationals across a wide variety of industries. The data resulting from her work is the basis of her book, The New Collar Workforce, published by Photonics Media Press. Wishing to make the stories of New Collar workers more accessible to young people, she partnered with Art Guild Press in Santa Fe, NM to create People of the New Collar Workforce. The new book features Augmented Reality to bring the stories of today’s workers to life.
Ms. Boisvert has consulted for the “Future Workforce Now” project organized by the National Governors Association, the Fab Foundation and FHI360 to develop policy options for States. She has been a keyote speaker for many workforce and technical organizations, and has been interviewed extensively, most recently by the BBC.
Her Market Segmentation graduate work at Johns Hopkins University led to her expertise in productization of high tech devices. Ms. Boisvert is a Fellow and Past President of the Laser Institute of America, an Ambassador of America Makes, and has served on the Optical Society of America’s Industry Advisory Board as well as the Boards of numerous international technical societies.