Bo Oppenheim, 03/05/07
Title:
‘Distinguished Engineering Educator’ Offers Students Real-World Wisdom
Header:
Professor Bohdan W. Oppenheim recently received the Distinguished Engineering Educator award from the Los Angeles Council of Engineers and Scientists.
Feature:
As a boy growing up in then-communist Poland, Professor Bohdan W. Oppenheim dreamed of coming to the United States.
“It was a very totalitarian place, very stifling,” he says of his homeland. “I just wanted to be free.”
After leaving Poland in 1970 – and spending a year in what he describes as “European purgatory” while waiting for a US Visa – Oppenheim’s boyhood dream was realized.
Today Oppenheim is the graduate director of Mechanical Engineering at LMU, and a much-admired mentor to his students. Recently he received the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award from the Los Angeles Council of Engineers and Scientists. The honor came as quite a surprise to Oppenheim, who had unknowingly been nominated by a former student.
“Beth Green was the wonderful graduate student who nominated me and I’m very gratified and humbled,” he says. “I never regarded myself as being in that class, so it was a nice surprise.”
But Oppenheim, who also teaches courses in Systems Engineering, insists it’s the subject matter of his courses – not his individual personality – that earned him the award. Most of his students are working engineers at local companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon who share similar pressures on the job. In his classes, they find real-world solutions to their daily frustrations.
“It’s a way of reorganizing the whole way of thinking about aerospace programs – large, complex programs – and how to execute them more efficiently,” Oppenheim says of his projects and teachings. “Discovering productivity reserves in those programs that normally big companies don’t know they have.”
In his efforts to improve efficiency within aerospace programs, Oppenheim works closely with other academics along with the aerospace companies. He maintains close institutional links with MIT as the coordinator of the Lean Aerospace Initiative, a collaboration he describes as a “synergistic activity” from which he benefits tremendously.
He is also the director of the Industrial Assessment Center, a program funded by a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. Through the program, faculty and students from a network of 26 universities visit industrial and manufacturing plants to help management find opportunities to save money in energy and productivity. Oppenheim notes that to date, the program has helped save these plants more than $35 million.
“I love to work in industry … by heart, I’m an engineer after all,” he says. “I always hated the pure academic, ‘ivory tower’ approach; I’m not that. I’m very practical … and I work closely with other academics who also have an industrial focus.”
Oppenheim attributes much of his success to the academic freedom he’s found at LMU. While some projects he’s lead may have been considered “unorthodox” at other institutions, Oppenheim says the university has been consistently supportive of his pursuits.
“I’m sure it comes from the Jesuit culture, the openness,” he explains. [In Poland] the church is completely and totally different; they are not as intellectual and open as the Jesuits, so I appreciated that even more.
“I truly love LMU … the people here are absolutely wonderful.”