[caption id="" align="alignright" width="453"] Daniel Cunningham of Bloomfield, a CVD Process Technician, is reflected in a rack of six-inch silicon wafers that he loads onto a rack that will be sent into a large furnace at Smart System Technology & Communications Center in Canandaigua.[/caption]

Daniel Cunningham works in one of the most sterile environments you'll find in western New York.

He's a process and maintenance technician at a SUNY-owned research facility in Canandaigua. His job is to don a bunny suit, enter a clean room and fuse layers of oxide onto wafers made of silicon. Cunningham and his co-workers make microelectromechanical systems, a fancy name for chips that eventually end up in digital cameras, cell phones, cars, and movie projectors.

At the core of what Cunningham does is a mixture of optics, photonics and electrical engineering. But Cunningham likes to remind people that he stumbled into this profession.

"I started out as an artillery man in the Marine Corps," Cunningham said. "I had no background in this. My job was to blow things up - not make things."

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