August 4, 2026 – Danko Arlington welcomed engineers from the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division (NSWCCD), together with academic collaborators from the University of Maryland (UMD), for a tour of its Baltimore foundry and manufacturing operations.
The visiting delegation included Chris Le, a mechanical engineer in NSWCCD’s Code 611 who specializes in solidification modeling of Navy castings, and Dr. Christopher Hovanec, Principal for Naval Alloys at Carderock Division. Representing the University of Maryland were Dr. Sudarsanam “Suresh” Babu, the Clark Distinguished Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and a globally recognized expert in welding metallurgy, and Dr. Gianna Valentino, a UMD professor specializing in materials performance in extreme environments.
The visit builds on parallel efforts at NSWCCD, which is standing up a program to provide greater research and technical support to the Navy’s nonferrous foundry base, and at UMD, which is expanding a metallurgy program with growing interest in foundry and casting-adjacent research. Discussions during the tour ranged from potential R&D collaboration between Danko Arlington and NSWCCD to opportunities for UMD faculty and students to engage directly with a working defense foundry.
Danko Arlington and UMD also discussed a foundry curriculum and infrastructure at the university modeled on Virginia Tech’s foundry program, joint work in metrology, photogrammetry, and nondestructive evaluation, access to Danko’s NDE facilities, and future undergraduate educational visits to the Baltimore plant. UMD’s Dr. Babu also invited Danko Arlington to contribute an invited lecture on robotics, autonomous manufacturing, and digital manufacturing adoption in industry, and offered UMD’s additive manufacturing laboratories as a resource for the company going forward.
The visitors also took note of Danko Arlington’s commitment to workforce development, including its practice of offering individuals meaningful second chances, and its recent hires of Daniel Danko, a University of Maryland mechanical engineering graduate and former member of Terps Racing, and Ashley Lacy, a Virginia Tech materials science graduate who worked with the university’s VT FIRE foundry program. Danko Arlington and its Navy and UMD guests agreed to continue building on the visit toward a longer-term partnership.
©2026