Missouri S&T Professor Paul Worsey, right, knows how to blows things up as viewers of the Discovery Channel will soon find out.

He is the doctor of destruction — the go-to-guy when you want to blow things up.

Paul Worsey, professor of mining engineering at the Missouri University of Science & Technology, has blown up bridges, trucks, rubber snakes, dead chickens, and lots and lots of other things. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the Discovery Channel — the same people who have brought us Man vs. Wild, Survivorman, Verminators, and Dirty Jobs — has found a kindred spirit in him.

For the last several months, Worsey has been traveling around the world taping scenes for the Discovery Channel’s new  13-part series called “The Detonators.” The show, in which Worsey stars with one of his former students, Braden Lusk, is supposed to begin airing sometime towards the beginning of 2009. The show will follow the two explosives experts as they go behind the scenes of major demolition projects such as skyscrapers, steel bridges and giant stadiums.

“There’s a lot more to it than just blowing things up,” said Beth Dietrich, co-executive producer for the Discovery Channel, in a news release. “There’s a surgical precision. It’s so perfect for Discovery because it’s kind of ‘gee-whiz, I had no idea,’ where it looks so easy but it’s incredibly complicated.”

Worsey has been teaching students how to blow things up for more than 20 years in Rolla. He teaches a popular fireworks course at Missouri S&T. And high school students flock to his summer camp on explosives.

In a Post-Dispatch profile of Worsey that ran in 2005, Lusk recounted the first impression Worsey made in his freshman introductory class.

Before Worsey began his lecture, he put in a video called “Dance of the Detonators.” It showed footage of things being blown up — set to classical music.

“Paul was in the back of the room laughing his crazy mad-professor laugh,” Lusk recalled.

Stay tuned for more details on when the series will air.