STCC graduate followed dream to career in lasers

by Laurie Loisel

Springfield, MA (01/27/2022) — This is a story about how one 1979 Springfield Technical Community College graduate parlayed his love of rock music into a passion for helping astronomers explore the far reaches of the universe.

And if that sounds a little, well, spaced-out, just keep reading.

Michael Lefebvre (pronounced LeFav) grew up in Northampton in a pack of five children raised by a single mother who encouraged her children to be among the first generation in the family to graduate college. In 1976, while a student at Northampton High School, Lefebvre attended a rock concert at the Springfield Civic Center, where he saw an early iteration of what would become a hallmark of the immersive rock concert experience: the laser light show.

"I knew immediately what I wanted to do with the rest of my life," remembers Lefebvre, now 62, during a Zoom interview from his home in Tucson, Ariz., where he works at the University of Arizona. "I was so enamored."

His mother was less enamored.

When Lefbvre told her about his plan, she rolled her eyes and said: "If that doesn't pan out, what else can you do with lasers?"

Turned out quite a lot, in fact.

Also turned out that Lefebvre would find a laser program a mere 20 miles away from his home, at STCC, where his sister's boyfriend had enrolled in what was then the Laser Electro Optics Technology Program, graduating in 1978 with the program's first graduating class.

Lefebvre was one of five graduates in 1979 from what is now the Optics and Photonics Program. In that program, he began to see just how that amazing rock concert light show that changed his life actually came to be - and the many other ways the technology could be harnessed.

"Oh, there's way more things you can do with it," he soon learned.

STCC Professor Nicholas Massa, program/curriculum coordinator for the STCC Optics and Photonics Program, said the applications for the technology are ubiquitous in society today.

"It's a field that touches every aspect of your life and then some," said Massa, who has taught at the college for 35 years. An electrical engineer by degree (laser technology is a specialty within electrical engineering,) Massa earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Western New England University and a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. He noted that in the 1960s, the big joke was that laser science was "a technology in search of an application," while nowadays there is virtually no field in which the technology is not used.

Among its applications: 3-D sensing, homeland security, precision optical manufacturing, nanotechnology, manufacturing of consumer goods, aerospace, defense, medical (in medical devices and all sorts of diagnostic equipment) and all forms of communication, to name just a few. The internet would not work if it weren't for fiber optic technology, for instance.

Among the oldest programs on the STCC campus, Massa noted that in no way means it is growing obsolete. Far from it. "It's one of the most cutting edge and fastest growing fields in technology," he said.

After Lefebvre earned his associate degree at STCC, he went on to earn a bachelor's degree at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, majoring in physics with a minor in optics, after which he accepted a job on the West Coast.

While working for his first employer, TRW Optics and Directed Energy Laboratory (today it is Northrop Grumman,) the company sent Lefebvre on a full boat scholarship to the University of Arizona's prestigious Optical Science Center.

Over the years, Lefebvre worked at large companies like TRW and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and smaller companies. His work focused on laser technology, at times top-secret work with military applications for the Department of Defense, including chemical lasers for the Star Wars military defense system promoted by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

He also worked for a number of years developing a drone-based reconnaissance system to find landmines and IEDs.

Nine years ago he returned to his alma mater at the University of Arizona, where he uses adaptive optics to improve the way astronomers can see outer space.

"This once top-secret technology is now used by astronomers to unravel the mysteries of space," he said.

His work there as an adaptive optics technical specialist is primarily on a telescope so large that it sits inside a football field-sized enclosure located at the summit of Mount Graham in Safford, Ariz. While he is based at the university campus in Tucson, he said he's spent 500 days in the past nine years at the telescope on Mount Graham, about 70 miles northeast of Tucson.

Several years ago, the University of Arizona commissioned a video to showcase the development of adaptive optics, revealing their once-secret use during the Cold War, called " The Top Secret Story of Adaptive Optics."

Lefebvre, among the people interviewed on camera for the video, speaks about how the technology that he once used to develop defense systems is now used in a different way.

"The astronomers have been seeking this knowledge," Lefebvre said in the video. "With the advent of adaptive optics we are now able to resolve much finer detail, much fainter objects and things much farther away. As we continue our sky surveys we're finding more and more planets that could potentially be habitable. They could sustain life, and for me working in astronomy, that's the quest."

Interested in applying to the Optics and Photonics program at STCC? Visit stcc.edu/laser or call Admissions at (413) 755-3333.

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