Ed Bloom: Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM
By David Morrison, Editor

Beyond his business activities, Bloom contributed to the industry through his extensive participation in industry conferences in the United States and Europe, where he presented numerous papers and seminars. Between these activities and his business ventures, Bloom has given more than 120 technical courses and presentations on his work experiences.

In addition to sharing his knowledge, Bloom lent his organizational skills to further the advancement of his field. In the late 1970s, Bloom was largely responsible for founding the International Power Conversion Society (IPCS), a nonprofit group based in Southern California that brought together leaders in the emerging power electronics field. Bloom also became a senior member of the IEEE Power Electronics Society.

Bloom's long and varied career in power electronics began shortly after he earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Kentucky in 1963. Though he didn't know it at the time, his career would be focused on power.

Early on he aspired to become an engineer working in the aerospace industry. As a teenager at Aquinas High School in Columbus, Ohio, Bloom read about the space program and realized it would offer job opportunities for engineers at the time he would be graduating from college. Although he had no mentors in electronics per se, Bloom credits the Dominican monks who taught him chemistry and general science at Aquinas with inspiring him to pursue engineering. That inspiration, together with the bright prospects of the space program, drew him to the study of electrical engineering.

Filling an Educational Vacuum

Bloom had been working in industry for nearly two decades, doing both power-supply design and consulting, when he realized the strong need for power electronics education and decided to take action. Although Bloom had earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering in the 1960s, almost none of his formal training covered power-supply or power-magnetics design. Bloom recalls that his university training on the latter topic consisted of “all of an hour on transmission-line design.”

Like other engineers at that time, he was forced to learn the principles and practical aspects of power-supply and power-magnetics design on the job. That situation persisted through the early 1980s when Bloom decided something needed to be done to train engineers in power electronics.

“I got motivated to teach magnetics design when I began to see there really wasn't a lot of education out there on that topic,” recalls Bloom, who consulted with industry colleagues about what they would like to see offered in the way of power electronics education. In 1981, Bloom and Joy, who had worked in the industry as a programmer, sat down with Col. William McLyman, a magnetics expert from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to discuss their ideas for offering a course on magnetics design.

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