In 1976, Mike graduated from SUNY Cortland, with a BS in education. Working at The National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT, he found his love for the mechanical engineering world. In 1981 he co-founded OptiPro, which evolved into a company designing and building CNC machines tools for the metalworking, manufacturing sector. 1991 brought about the “Opticam SX project” with APOMA and the University of Rochester, Center for Optics Mfg, and propelled OptiPro’s focus toward affordable, deterministic manufacturing and measuring solutions for precision optics.