Editorial

Abstract

We have reached the end of the second volume of the Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing (JAMP), produced under very different circumstances from the first volume in 2019. The world has been convulsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which-in addition to the suffering it has caused for its victims-has challenged manufacturing and processing systems to maintain their performance. Despite some shortages in tissue goods caused by shifts in demand from commercial to residential products, manufacturing systems have shown resiliency toward disruptions in labor and supply chain availability. The pandemic may increase the rate of automation within supply chains, and it may also cause a rethinking of supply chain configurations to reduce risks of disruptions to international shipments. Striking a new balance between resiliency and cost will drive manufacturing and processing research and innovation in new directions, and here, at JAMP, we look forward to reviewing and publishing articles that explore this tradeoff and develop and use new metrics for performance to drive research and development. The pandemic has also revealed the need to rapidly translate advances in vaccine research and development into manufacturing doses at a large scale. This is a task that intertwines manufacturing technology and regulatory innovation with public investment to enable steps to be executed in parallel. We published a commentary on the topic of rapid development and deployment of vaccines [1] in our July issue, part of a broader effort to speed up the dissemination of research relevant to the pandemic that has taken place across the publishing landscape. We welcome more submissions that connect research with the manufacturing challenges created by COVID-19, particularly in the manufacturing supply chains associated with delivering and distributing vaccine doses at a large scale. Beyond COVID-19 concerns, in our second year, we continued to publish content related to sustainability in the form of research articles on biomass processing, [2-4] carbon capture, [5-7] and recycling. [8] This reflects our goal to connect advances in manufacturing and processing to important societal goals, with an emphasis on presenting metrics such as carbon footprint, energy use, and life cycle impact. We were also delighted to host a special issue, expertly guest edited by Tom Van Gerven and