A 940-mile commute to work, one way, for Canisteo engineer zt

Canisteo, N.Y. —

Steve Faes and his family enjoy the Southern Tier so much he lives here and commutes 940 miles to his demanding high tech job.

That commute is just one way: Returning home adds another 940 miles.

Faes likes living in Canisteo while being director of mechanical engineering at InQ Biosciences Corp. in Huntsville, Ala.  So he makes the round-trip flight every week, except for twice each year when he needs to haul his golf clubs to and from Alabama, as he did in mid-April. Then he drives the almost-thousand miles each way.

In Huntsville, Faes works 10-to-12 hours daily to complete design, fabrication and testing the exotic scientific instrument he has been engineering for almost two years. The device, named InQ and pronounced “ink,” provides the mechanism for intelligent cell growth, he explained.

His almost-as-brief explanation is that the machine will be “a quantum leap” for the thousands of laboratories and companies that now use technician-prepared petri dishes to grow cell cultures. But intensive hand labor to grow cell cultures is expensive and limiting.

Faes’ longer, more technical explanation is that InQ is an automated completely-enclosed environment that can accommodate a variety of liquid media in a climate where temperature, humidity, rate of media perfusion and gas diffusion are controlled, he said.

Huntsville is a rapidly growing biotechnology center that is the home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. InQ Biosciences employees there provide exceptional technology for cell-based research, the company website explains.

Faes has worked on InQ and the machine’s ability to promote “intelligent cell growth” since the beginning of 2009, first as a consultant and then full time since late last summer, he said.

His professional career began after graduation from State University of New York at Canton with a degree in mechanical engineering technology. His experience as a designer began with Smith Corona in his native Syracuse helping to develop the first electronic typewriter. His name and others are on the patent of the typewriter’s distinct daisy wheel.