The URochester-led STELLAR challenge is a finalist within the NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines competitors.
A coalition led by the University of Rochester that goals to make the Rochester, New York, and Finger Lakes area a national hub for laser science and development lately hosted the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a website go to as a finalist within the Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines) program.
URochester’s STELLAR (Science, Technology and Engineering for Laser and Laser Applications Research) project is one in every of 15 nationwide finalists—and the one one in New York State—being thought of for the second NSF Engines competitors. The competitors goals to construct and scale new innovation clusters that speed up the development of vital applied sciences and develop regional economies nationwide.
“There is no better place for a national resurgence in laser technology than the imaging capital of the world, which has a nearly 175-year history of expertise in precision, innovation, and light,” says Thomas Brown, the director of URochester’s Institute of Optics and STELLAR principal investigator. “This region has the pedigree, talent, and brainpower needed to fill national talent shortages, help translate technologies into businesses, bring manufacturing to a scale that can compete with leaders in Europe and China, and fuel core research and development.”
As a part of the ultimate rounds of the competitors, NSF is conducting in-person interviews and a due-diligence assessment to guage every finalist’s dangers, sources, and capacity to satisfy the nation’s evolving wants. The Rochester website go to was the end result of a planning course of that formally started in 2023, when NSF awarded URochester a $1 million Regional Innovation Engines Development Award grant.
The area for this spherical of competitors has narrowed from nearly 300 letters of intent to fifteen finalists, and the NSF anticipates asserting the 2026 NSF Engines awards later this yr.
The in-person conferences with NSF officers had been a chance for STELLAR’s organizers to showcase how they might progress the area as a national chief in laser applied sciences, schooling, firm creation, manufacturing, and workforce development. The challenge’s key companions embody URochester’s Institute of Optics and Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), Monroe Community College (MCC), Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), NextCorps Luminate, Greater Rochester Enterprise (GRE), AmeriCOM, and New York State.
“This region has the pedigree, talent, and brainpower needed to fill national talent shortages, help translate technologies into businesses, bring manufacturing to a scale that can compete with leaders in Europe and China, and fuel core research and development.”
In addition to the STELLAR organizers, the go to introduced different vital public, educational, and business companions from throughout the area, state, and the nation to take part and voice their help for this essential initiative. Among the handfuls of officers who voiced their help for STELLAR in the course of the website go to had been Congressman Joe Morelle, Congressman Nick Langworthy, and Kevin Rochford, the CEO and Executive Director of SPIE, the worldwide society for optics and photonics.
With native companies, educators, nonprofits, and authorities entities aligning to help the challenge, STELLAR’s management has secured matching help on the state stage if awarded NSF funding.
“New York State is incredibly proud to support this catalytic proposal, including with a $16 million matching commitment,” says Elizabeth Lusskin, the chief vice chairman for small enterprise and know-how development at Empire State Development. “If awarded, STELLAR would provide the connective tissue to knit together investments the state, local partners, and corporations have already made in both the laser sector and the region and bring them to a scale to serve national interests. It would not only benefit the laser industry but many other tech sectors in New York and around the country that rely on lasers, including biotech, defense, and semiconductors.”
Leveraging regional brainpower
Rochester is dwelling to pioneering academic applications—from highschool to the doctoral stage—centered on the science of sunshine, which may assist construct the laser workforce. URochester’s almost 100-year-old Institute of Optics is the nation’s first optics program; RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science turned the nation’s first program to supply levels within the interdisciplinary area of imaging science; and MCC is the nation’s first group school to award affiliate levels in optical techniques know-how.
More than 150 optics, photonics, imaging, and laser supply-chain firms already function within the Greater Rochester area.
Alexis Vogt ’01, ’07 (PhD), chair of optical techniques know-how at MCC, leads the schooling and workforce development part of STELLAR and says the challenge could be a chance to have these academic applications work collaboratively and develop their affect to achieve folks throughout the area.
“One of the biggest gaps in the laser industry today is workforce development,” says Vogt. “Our 11-county region is home to 1.2 million people with tremendous untapped potential. Through the STELLAR initiative, we are expanding access to laser education and training—particularly in rural communities—and creating new pathways into the industry for remote learners, military veterans, the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and individuals whose degrees have left them underemployed. By opening these doors, we can build the skilled workforce needed to power the next generation of laser technologies.”
STELLAR would additionally intensify research in a area that already boasts URochester’s LLE, dwelling to the biggest—and a few of the strongest—lasers in academia, as nicely as amenities just like the RIT Semiconductor Nanofabrication Laboratory.
“STELLAR would empower our expert researchers to collaboratively focus on the frontiers of laser development,” says Stefan Preble, RIT’s Bausch and Lomb Professor and PhD program director of microsystems engineering. “There is already brilliant research and development underway locally in ultrafast lasers, microchip-scale lasers, lasers for biotechnology, and quantum networking using lasers. STELLAR would equip us to conduct even more laser research on a grander scale.”
Capitalizing on financial alternatives
STELLAR’s management says that the challenge would place the US to develop its stake in a $16 trillion world market that is dependent upon lasers for every thing from precision manufacturing and quantum to vitality and protection. They be aware that greater than 150 optics, photonics, imaging, and laser supply-chain firms already function within the Greater Rochester area.
“We have a unique density and concentration of talent,” says Leah George VanScott, government vice chairman of enterprise development and technique at GRE. “The region also has an unusually mature and collaborative translational ecosystem as well as unparalleled foundational assets—everything from tiny integrated photonic lasers to 50-meter beam lines. Rochester and the Finger Lakes provide one of the strongest starting points in the nation to scale. STELLAR is an opportunity to turn our region’s existing foundation into an engine necessary to secure our nation’s technological future.”
Sujatha Ramanujan, managing director and chief funding officer of NextCorps Luminate, works to assist entrepreneurs begin or develop companies associated to optics, photonics, and imaging. She sees unimaginable alternatives for home firms to develop their share of the laser market.
“The US only makes about a third of the lasers used in this country, and that number is shrinking,” says Ramanujan. “Applications from defense to medical devices to quantum depend on lasers. We are headed to a serious national problem if we don’t close that gap and start making our own lasers. But between the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, the universities here in Rochester, and the AIM Photonics TAP facility, Rochester already has the infrastructure in place to support the laser industry. STELLAR could propel us into the next generation of science-based business.”