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President Obama To Visit Boise State's New Product Development Lab

During his stop at Boise State University Wednesday, President Barack Obama will visit a lab that helps local entrepreneurs and industries build prototypes of their products to help get them into the marketplace.

Obama will visit the College of Engineering’s New Product Development Lab. It’s managed and run by the College of Business and Economics. 

The lab serves mechanical engineering students. It provides them with hands-on learning opportunities associated with their own projects. The school says those students also work as technicians for local businesses “looking for new products and markets”. The lab contains 3-D printers and other rapid proto-typing equipment. 

“Boise State is engaged in multiple kinds of rapid prototyping, ranging from cutting-edge ceramics — they are “co-fired” in a kiln along with embedded conductive and electronic materials to be used as micropropulsion devices that can keep nanosatellites in the correct orbit with microscopic bursts of energy — to “printed electronics” using a light, flexible and conductive nano-material called grapheme that can be “printed” in stacks onto tiny, inexpensive sensors, resistors and other electronics. These rapidly prototyped and produced chips can be attached to a package to monitor its location, or to human skin to monitor glucose levels.” – Boise State University

The President is scheduled to speak at the Caven-Williams Sports Complex on the BSU campus at 2:45 p.m. He’ll leave Idaho for Lawrence, Kansas, where he’s scheduled to speak Thursday.

Find Scott Graf on Twitter at @ScottGrafRadio

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