Remembering Michael Stephen Feld: Physics and Biomedicine Pioneer (1940–2010)

Abstract

Michael Feld ranged over a wide intellectual landscape. During his more than 50 years in physics and biomedicine, he pioneered on several frontiers. His career began with fundamental discoveries in laser science and ended as he was producing exciting, innovative developments in biomedical optics and biomedical physics. Feld enjoyed crossing boundaries and savored diversity of ideas, of research fields, of colleagues, and of collaborators. His taste for intellectual variety was in notable contrast to his fixed and long association with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He entered MIT in 1958 as an undergraduate, and except for a junior year in England, he never left. Even when he took a sabbatical, he took it at MIT. It is as though his firm anchor to one institution freed his imagination and research to span many fields. Michael Feld had a gift for building collaborations across disciplines. He was director of MIT’s Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory from 1976 until his death on April 10, 2010, and he made the Spectroscopy Laboratory a place that welcomed scientists of all ages and nationalities and from many disciplines (see Fig. 1). Under his direction, the laboratory became a center for a variety of productive collaborations. He institutionalized and increased funding for such cooperative research by establishing, with National Science Foundation (NSF) support, the MIT Regional Laser Research Facility, and, with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBRC). He worked closely with collaborators from the Cleveland Clinic and from Massachusetts General Hospital. He was an affiliated member of the MIT–Harvard Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program and supervised the doctoral work of men and women in that program and also in chemical engineering, bioengineering, and materials research, as well as in physics. Many of his former students and postdocs have become leaders in health science or physics.