Faces of Discovery

“I’m not a very interesting person,” Ethan Secor says with a laugh when asked to be profiled as an Iowa State Face of Discovery. “My wife and I have two small children, and I have my work. That’s about it.” It’s the kind of self-effacing statement that makes you lean in, because people who say that often have the most compelling stories. In Secor’s case, what he calls ‘boring’ is actually his superpower.

“I can tolerate tedious things,” he admits. That trait once helped him train for marathons and Ironman qualifiers—hours of steady, focused effort, pushing through discomfort. Today, it enables him to tackle one of the most intricate challenges in modern engineering: printing electronics on three-dimensional surfaces. This work eventually led to his receipt of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2024.

The road to this line of research wasn’t straight. “It probably looks like a straight path looking back,” Secor says, “but it was a weird fluke.” After studying chemistry and physics, he pursued materials science in graduate school, then joined Sandia National Labs as a postdoc. There

, he learned printer design and process science, skills that now set his lab apart.

Secor leads a research group at Iowa State focused on aerosol jet printing, a specialized additive manufacturing technique for electronics. Unlike traditional methods to make electronics that etch circuits onto flat boards, aerosol jet printing uses a fine mist of conductive ink, guided by a computer-controlled nozzle, to deposit material on virtually any surface—even curved or irregular shapes.

“It’s like an inkjet printer, but instead of printing pictures, we’re printing functional circuits,” Secor explains. The process atomizes conductive ink into microscopic droplets, carried by a gas stream and focused into a precise jet. This enables extremely fine features—down to tens of microns—and the ability to print on 3D objects without contact.

The advantages are significant: design flexibility, material efficiency, and rapid prototyping. Circuits can be integrated directly onto components, reducing assembly steps and minimizing waste compared to traditional subtractive methods.

But the complexity is daunting. “There’s a lot of interplay between materials, process science, machine design, and software,” Secor says. His team works across all these domains—developing inks, designing hardware, and writing software to control the printer’s operation. They’ve even created real-time monitoring systems to make the process more reliable, a breakthrough now adopted by companies and federal labs.

Electronics are everywhere—from cars to medical devices to smart infrastructure. “If you look at a car now compared to 20 years ago, it used to be an engine with wheels. Now it’s a computer with wheels,” Secor says. Printed electronics could make these systems lighter, cheaper, and more sustainable. “Imagine building-integrated electronics, sensors with power sources and antennas talking to each other,” he says. “If we can make the process reliable and cost-effective, the applications are enormous.”

Some of Secor’s most exciting work began with a risk—and a conversation. “One of my grad students, Jeremy Rurup, was interested in conformal printing,” Secor recalls. “We didn’t know anything about toolpath planning, but we bought a six-axis robot arm and decided to figure it out.” That gamble paid off. It led to a funded proposal with mechanical engineering colleague Adarsh Krishnamurthy and opened a new frontier for Secor’s lab: printing electronics on complex 3D surfaces.

“That collaboration was huge,” Secor says. “It pushed us into areas we wouldn’t have explored otherwise.” Today, those early experiments, along with the help of the ISU Startup Factory, have grown into a startup, Contour Circuits, focused on advancing conformal printing technology.

For Secor, research is about empowerment. “If we’re doing our job now, we’re empowering other people—circuit designers, device manufacturers—to do their jobs more effectively,” he says. His lab typically hosts four to six undergraduates alongside graduate students and a postdoc. “Seeing where they end up going is always fun,” Secor says.