Benjamin Engel
Director of the UWM Prototyping Center
Ben’s path to the Prototyping Center wasn’t a straight line. He started with a foundation in art and visual design, and over time that evolved into a hands-on career spanning engineering, fabrication, and project management. That cross-disciplinary background is something he leans on every day. He thinks about form and function together, and is comfortable moving between the creative and technical sides of a project, whether that’s sketching out a concept, running CAD, or managing the timeline and budget of a complex build.
Over the years he has taken on technical and leadership roles across a wide range of industries, gaining broad experience in product development and project management from early stage concepts through final fabrication. He brings expertise in machining, composite and metal fabrication, and 3D modeling, and uses industry-standard CAD tools to create designs that are both precise and practical to produce.
Ben holds a BFA in Furniture Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design, a creative foundation that continues to inform how he approaches every project. That blend of artistic thinking and technical expertise drives the work at the Prototyping Center, where his adaptability across disciplines and deep hands-on experience make him a committed partner for anyone navigating the complexities of product development.
Kyle Jansson
Head of Entrepreneurship & Engineering
Kyle has spent his career so far developing technical products in research and design roles as a Mechanical Engineer. He has a background designing components and systems in industrial, medical, and consumer industries for private, public, consulting companies and research institutions. His keen awareness of the product development process lets him know when to apply the next steps to efficiently and effectively design a component or system while ultimately knowing how to get to the finish line.
With a several generations in his family as fabricators, Kyle now combines his own passion and lifetime of hands-on fabrication skill sets with the world’s most advanced prototyping machines available at his fingertips. This will allow him to bring any idea to reality through design and prototyping. With 4 patents and 22 publications so far in his career, he is eager to continue to innovate and discover new technological breakthroughs through collaborating with brilliant minds. In addition to fabricating parts, Kyle’s goals are to engineer ideas into a reality to develop tools and technology for researchers and developers to yield scientific breakthroughs.
JD Lang
Advanced Model/Instrument Maker
JD’s entire professional career has always been related to designing, prototyping and building custom projects. His founding education started with learning traditional work skill sets at Milwaukee Tech High School. He has evolved step-for-step with the rapid pace of fabrication technology to compliment his hands-on talents to design in CAD and then fabricate complex parts with our advanced CNC machining centers. His role beyond fabricating parts is in evolving the competencies of our machining centers through programming and operating our CNC equipment and to weld anything that comes our way.
After starting out his career at the Milwaukee Science Museum, he continued on making models and prototypes for many Fortune 500 companies – which you’ve likely encountered in your life without knowing it. With a history of interesting career experiences, he is comfortable manually or automating fabrication using a wide range of materials ranging from metals, to plastics, to wood. With keen mindfulness of nearly every fabrication process in the industry, he brings a broad perspective to plan the best way to produce creative, inventive, and professional prototypes. Now his skill sets will fulfill the needs of the innovators, designers and engineers he works with to make their novel ideas and projects come to life.