Michael Bukshtab

Michael Alexander Bukshtab received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Optical Design and Spectroscopy and in Physical Optics from The State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics and from The Vavilov' State Optical Institute (GOI), plus also had a post-doctoral tenure, investigating various high-purity silica glasses and some specialty fibers in The Institute of Silicate Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of Russia - all three in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. In 1977 his Masters thesis received the Best-Diploma Award among more than thirty technical universities in the city of Leningrad, Russia. Michael's first scientific monograph: "The Low-Loss Measurement Techniques" was published in 1988 by the Energoatomizdat simultaneously in Moscow and Leningrad. In 1989 Michael became directly elected by all employees The Board Chairman of The Leningrad's Branch of The Institute of Telecommunications, where he served until his immigration into the United States in 1991. In the USA Michael continued working on the design, research, development, and fabrication of optical systems and components for many companies, such as Sandoz, Corning, Pirelli, Kodak, CIENA, Lucent, GE Advanced Materials, and ASML, also working with the Rockwell-Collins, Inc. Michael's experience in broad aspects of optics via M. Bukshtab consulting include investigation, analysis and detection of color-shifting, polarization-dependent, backreflection, backscattering and other low-loss related phenomena, designing all-optical wavelength-switching and cross-connect systems and optical add-drop division-multiplexing fiber networks, working on terabit optical routers and fiber-optic backplanes, investigating and enhancing advanced extreme-ultra-violet lithography systems, interferometric and diffraction-based positioning sensors, improving optically preamplified fiber-based lasers for air-to-ground lidars, as well as enhancing techniques and methodologies for color-coordinate measurements. Michael has authored and co-authored more than 35 Patents and Invention Certificates, while participating in more than 75 Scientific Publications. The most recent compilation of Michael's research and development activities in the field of laser and fiber optics and photonics is reflected in his latest research monograph: "Applied Photometry, Radiometry, and Measurements of Optical Losses," 2012, XIX, 712 p. 441 illus., published in early 2012 as a book in the Springer Series in Optical Sciences, volume 163: http://www.springer.com/physics/optics+%26+lasers/book/978-94-007-2164-7

ONE'S LIVING UNIVERSITIES explores author's personal experiences growing up within a chaotic and at times hilarious political climate of former Soviet Union, becoming a laser and fiber optics scientist and participating in such transient events as perestroika - being directly elected then as an independent chairman of the board of a scientific institution by the electorate seeking market reforms and political changes. That institution contributed to the upcoming direct elections to the first Russian parliament, involving a struggle between bureaucratic forces and a free will of people learning initial lessons of political choreography. A personal journey took your story teller to the US, as a seeking political asylum refugee, where ongoing pursuit of perfection and balance takes any reader via many diversified, plus rather amusing, events of new realities, not necessarily as free-willing as perceived from a distance, thus making for unusual revelations leading to those sad, cheerful, as well as funny encounters reflected in One's Living Universities.

One's Living Universities is written as one fictional autobiography consisting of seemingly independent but definitely interrelated and so correlated collection of short stories. The narrative quest of the stories is not written from the perspective of time - rather as an insight to the nature and progress or regress of events happening around the one destined to become a physicist first and a writer by one's circumstances initially on the technical subjects and finally as the observer of the political and social realities around the world plus throughout opposite economic systems...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AVAY4L0

Misha Buchstab: ONE'S LIVING UNIVERSITIES

mboptical@gmail.com