Roger Jones, corporate president of Solar Atmospheres, was nominated as a trustee on the ASM International Board of Trustees effective October 2016. The board of ASM, the Materials Information Society, is comprised of four officers and nine trustees. Three new trustees are elected by the membership every year, and each serves a three-year term.
Jones attended Hocking Technical College in Nelsonville, Ohio, where he studied heat processing technology. He has also taken selective metallurgical (MEI) courses from ASM and other technical organizations. He joined ABAR Corporation in 1975 and worked in the heat treating division until 1978. He then started work at Vacuum Furnace Systems Corporation at its inception in 1978, along with his father, William R. Jones FASM, who founded the company. His primary duties included manufacturing vacuum heat treating and brazing furnaces, as well as hot zone installation and field service work.
In 1983, Jones assisted the founding of Solar Atmospheres, Inc. where he held the position of vice president. He was promoted to president of Solar Atmospheres, Inc. in 1993. With the addition of Solar’s Hermitage, Pennsylvania, facility in early 2001, Jones was then promoted to the position of corporate president. In 1995, he established a strategic management team within Solar Atmospheres. Today, Solar is the largest privately owned vacuum heat treating company in North America with four facilities: Souderton and Hermitage in Pennsylvania and Fontana in California. The newest facility is in Greenville, South Carolina, operational in May 2015.
Jones has been a member of the Metal Treating Institute since 1983, a member of the Board of Trustees since 1998, and was president of the Institute from 2004 to 2005. He was called back onto the board in 2009 for a third term and completed that role in 2012.
Jones has also been a member of ASM Philadelphia “Liberty Bell” chapter since 1983 and has chaired nine committees within that time. He became his company’s sustaining member representative in 1986. He was Philadelphia chapter chairman for the 1993-1994 chapter years. Also, he was an instructor for the chapter-sponsored MEI courses and he continues to support the local chapter in numerous ways.
Jones was a founding member of HTS in August 1994. In 2005, he was appointed to the HTS Board and served as vice president from 2011 to 2013 and served as the president of HTS from 2013 to 2015.
Jones was the recipient of the Philadelphia chapter William Hunt Eisenman Award in 2001 and the Distinguished Service Award in 2004. In 2009, he received the President’s Award. Most recently, he received the Adolph Schaefer Special Achievement Award in May 2015. In 2009, he received the Distinguished Service Award. Other awards from MTI also included the Award of Merit in 2011 and the Exemplary Service Award in 2012. Jones has given talks and published various technical papers in industry publications.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: solaratm.com
