An Unexpected Partnership and Bitmap Printing Has Resulted in a Solution for Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery

Though movies and TV shows love to show the trope of the lonely genius, working alone to save the world, in reality collaboration is a necessity in order to realize the most incredible projects. And what better way to find these collaborations than through conferences? One notable example is actually shown by two of the keynote speakers at AMUG 2023, Nicholas Jacobson, a professor at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, and Rob Ducey, a technical supervisor at animation specialist Laika Studios. The two met by chance at AMUG 2019, bonding over a little-known 3D modeling and printing process called bitmap printing. Now, they are working together on a project to use the technology to create innovative designs for pediatric epilepsy, cardiology and cleft palates. We sat down with the two to learn more.

3DN: Could you please introduce yourselves?

Nick: Hi, I’m Nick Jacobson and I’ve been involved in 3D printing since 2004. My background is in architecture, and I first worked on 3D printing in architecture school using binder jetting with refined corn starch on a Z-corp printer. We made landscape and architectural models and this was just at the dawn of the computational design boom in architecture. Students we just starting to learn how to code and program, so we became very interested in translating these ideas through digital fabrication to create unusual forms.

This love of form generation followed me throughout my architectural career, where I worked for some great architects such as Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, and Harry Teague. After some years practicing architecture, I was accepted into the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Business School. Here, I was part of an early research program looking into Voxel Printing on what was then Connex and now Stratasys. We developed software to model and 3D printing using Voxel technology. Initially the work focused on structural engineering and design.