UNDER THIRTY - Society of Manufacturing Engineers

Ryan BoehmAge: 25Omax Corp.Kent, WARyan Boehm has worked at waterjet cuttingdeveloper Omax Corp. since October 2006when he joined the company as a researchassistant and waterjet operator. Since 2011,Ryan has worked there as an R&D mechanical engineer,designing experiments to evaluate technologiesand helping to write code for Omax’s Intelli-Visor monitoringsoftware platform released at IMTS 2012.A standout athlete in high school, Ryan was captainof his Bishop Garcia Diego High School football team inVentura, CA, where he also competed in wrestling andweightlifting. Ryan started out in manufacturing as amachinist at his grandfather’s company, Tricoss Inc., amanufacturer of springs and metal stampings in Ventura.After his freshman year in college, he worked as awaterjet operator at Trupart Mfg. in Ventura.Ryan earned a multidisciplinary degree with abachelor of sciences in Applied and ComputationalMath Sciences and a BA in European Studies at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle. “It was a multidisciplinarydegree, so there werea lot of different subjects that Iwas learning,” he said. “It wasnice to be able to learn the appliedmath side, physics and even electrical engineering—areally diverse program, I definitely recommendit to others.”When he’s not working, Ryan says he’s become kindof a true resident of the Pacific Northwest, going outcharter boat fishing for halibut in the ocean and findingtime for fishing the abundant rivers nearby Seattle.At Omax, Ryan’s work is partially research intomechanical aspects of the business but also involvesa lot of electrical and software development. Ryan firstgot interested in programming when he learned VisualBasic (VB) when he was 12 years old. “I was interested"I was the one that actually wrotethe code to make that function."UNDER THIRTYin video games, and I was actually a real tinkerer,”recalled Ryan, whose skills include using Visual Basic,Java, SuperCollider, Delphi, Assembly, C/C++, HTML,Matlab and Fortran 90, as well as analysis softwaresuch as Maple, JMPStats, LabView and QVI Laser.His work at Omax makes great use of his programmingskills, where he has assisted Dr. Axel Henningon projects involving waterjet controls, sensors andpump technologies. He’s designed circuitry on sensorcells and other projects, and also in developing Omax’sIntelli-Visor monitoring software.“I was very, very involved on that project,” Ryannoted of the monitoring software. “There’s been a lotof testing in the past, dating back to close to a decade,on different sensor technologies and interfacing thosewith the controller. And what I did was working with Dr.Axel Henning, I worked off of his model, so the softwarearchitecture we developed together, mostly coming fromhim from previous studies, and I was the one that actuallywrote the code to make that function.”His research work includeswhat he called side projectson developments in micro andnanotechnologies, an areathat interests Ryan for future study. “It’s more of aside thing. I am considering going back to further myeducation and probably moving into those fields inthe future.“I’m very interested in nanotech manufacturing. Wedo some work in micromachining here with Omax. Justgiven the technology, it’s a little tricky to get into nano.That would definitely be a whole new field for me. UC-Santa Barbara, as I was leaving about eight years ago,they got money from the state of California grants for ananotech manufacturing and research institution there.It’s intriguing me.” METHIRTY UNDER THIRTY PROFILES28 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | July 2013