Michael Mielke, PhD, ’00, ’03 received the UCF Professional Achievement Award at the Black & Gold Gala 2014 on October 23, 2014. Since earning his PhD from CREOL in 2003 Michael has had a distinguished career. He helped found Raydiance, the leading provider of industrial grade ultrafast laser solutions. As the principal architect of the Raydiance laser platform, he has brought ultrafast light to the industrial laser materials processing sector where previous attempts to do so had failed, since conventional ultrafast lasers are extremely sensitive to ambient conditions and require hourly tuning by a highly trained laser engineer. Michael’s bold approach to technology advancement and relentless work ethic have been clear from the start, which is why he won the Grand Prize in the OSA New Focus Student Award in 2003.