Coburn's Home Webpage

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Introduction:

Welcome to my web pages! The comments below and the menu at left provide a snapshot-view into myself and into my objectives for teaching. Enjoy.

I started my career in engineering in 1987 with an internship at McDonnell Douglas, which merged with The Boeing Company in 1997. My first 9 years were in the static structural analysis of commercial widebody aircraft after a short initial period in mass properties. The subject of my analysis consisted primarily of metallic structures, but I also had opportunity to perform some challenging specialized analyses such as crashworthiness analysis and floatation analysis on the MD11 aircraft. I also received some project management experience leading multi-disciplined teams, and got a little management experience leading the MD-12 (double-decker) Nose Team and the MD-XX Nose Team, which consisted of 50% Alenia Partner personnel.

In 1997, leadership announced the end of the MD-XX program, and I secured a transfer to Huntington Beach (HB), where I accepted the position of Team Lead for the Stress Team for the Delta III Rocket's Payload Fairing, Payload Attach Fitting, and Interstage. These were all contructed primarily of composite sandwich structures, and we were mere months from a set of full-scale static qualification tests with negligible documentation of the analysis, which made my life quite busy and challanging for some time to come.

In the following years my team-lead responsibilities in HB moved onward to include responsibility for the Delta II Fairing, and later for the Delta IV Interstage, LOX Skirt, Centerbody, Thermal Shield, and Aeroskirt, under Lonnie Thorpe as manager. We had a great team and I handed the reigns of leadership to many of our talented analysts prior to moving on to the Scramjet for a short time in early 2005.

In July of 2005 I accepted the role of manager for the Stress & Loads team for Boeing's Commercial Aircraft Modifications Team in Long Beach. The team consisted of 40 analysts, and in the next seven years I cultivated the growth and expansion of the team, attracting, developing, and unleashing great analysts and leaders until we were bursting at the seams with capability. Having passed the reigns of leadership to some of the best amongst my team throughout the process, I started looking for a new challenge and accepted a tenure-track teaching position at California State University Pomona (CPP) to pursue another passion of mine (teaching). At this point the Strength Team for Boeing in Long Beach included 250 analysts led by 9 managers, each hand-picked for their technical and managerial skills and interest.

I am now in my third year teaching at CPP, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my career in education so far, although I have found it to be orders of magnitude more work than what I experienced in industry.

My goal is to be a great teacher and to continue nudging US technology & engineers forward towards becoming and remaining the best in the world. May the Lord help me in this goal.

Hobbies:

My hobbies include chess, motorcycle riding, bow-hunting, camping and hiking, water-skiing, surfing, and many other outdoor activities.

Faith:

I believe the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God, through-which He has and continues to reveal Himself to mankind. I believe the Bible that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Savior of mankind who gave Himself to voluntarily die for the sins of the world, so that all who place their faith in Him alone will live eternally in heaven with Him after completing this short life which He has entrusted to us. I believe the role of mankind is to seek God, to worship Him, and to submit daily to His Word, His will and His Ways as revealed in Scripture through the Holy Spirit who testifies on His behalf.