Jamie is a Professor of Practice at the LUT University, and he has been involved with Lappeenranta since 2017 when he received an honorary doctorate from LUT.
The university also created Jamie Hyneman Center (JHC) for embracing values and philosophy of Jamie, who "is a bold entrepreneur and trailblazer who never tires of trying something new and developing the old", as Associate Professor Markku Ikävalko stated in Lappeenranta earlier this month during the visit of Jamie.
According to Ikävalko, LUT is doing so every day.
Hyneman gave on 18 November a lecture at the LUT campus in Lappeenranta about "Peeling the Onion: How to Start Prototyping". A video from his previous vitis to Finland in 2017 is available here.
UPM and LUT
UPM has been supporting LUT for decades. The main research centre of UPM is also located in Lappeenranta, making the connection even closer.
"We have cooperation with LUT on many levels from financial support to sponsoring the student activities and providing raw materials to their prototype workshop", says Ari Voutilainen from UPM Plywood. Ari is often called humorously as a "UPM space program manager" because of his involvement with the WISA Woodsat mission.
UPM is helping to develop a robot that will be used by Jamie to give lectures as an avatar at LUT remotely from his home in California. One robot will be located also at the Buofore House, UPM headquarters in Helsinki.
Hyneman and WISA Woodsat
When UPM invited Hyneman and a delegation from LUT to visit the company's headquarters in Helsinki, our chief engineer Samuli Nyman was also present showing a WISA Woodsat model and explaining the mission – sharing the same values of bold innovation and unprejudiced research as Jamie and LUT.
"It was a super interesting and inspiring evening", Samuli stated. "Jamie was very well informed and asked smart questions about the coating of the plywood parts and the additively manufactured camera boom".
"We wondered if ALD coating could be used for creating wood that can't be burned at all, and there was also an idea of building a rocket out of wood."
One of the countless stories Jamie told from the MythBusters was about this: they experimented with the rockets several times in the TV series and according to Jamie the main lesson was to avoid "too fatty combustibles in the rockets – like sausages."
Most of the good stories from the MythBusters were connected with danger or failed experiments that were not included in the final programs. As usually, these were still very important, and especially now experiences from the near misses and mishaps can be applied in the development of safety measures.
Terhi Virkki-Hatakka from LUT said that at the JHC they want to use Jamie as an example when teaching students to evaluate themselves the safety and security and to look after each other.
According to Jamie, the most important rule is still simply “Don’t be stupid”.
From left: Terhi Virkki-Hatakka (LUT), Marko Kasurinen (LUT), Samuli Nyman (Arctic Astronautics), Jamie Hyneman, Ari Voutilainen (UPM), Pirkko Harrela (UPM), Markku Ikävalko (LUT) and Juha-Matti Saksa (LUT).