Medford tech company advancing with energy
Principals in Advanced Energy Systems of Medford show an international linear collider super conducting cavitiy in the Brookhaven National Lab. They are, from left, Anthony J. Favale, president and chief executive; John W. Rathke, chief engineer, and Timothy J. Myers, business manager. (Aug. 10, 2010) Credit: Newsday / Audrey C. Tiernan
If the sign outside Tony Favale's technology company in Medford looks backward, that's because it is: Systems Energy Advanced is really Advanced Energy Systems.
"We like that," says Favale, a company founder and now its president and chief executive. At Advanced Energy Systems they like to make people stop and stare -- and think.
Favale and his team are thinking about things like inventing laser beams that can destroy enemy missiles fired at U.S. Navy ships, or methods of determining whether vessels may be carrying nuclear weapons, or ways of helping scientists explore the origins of the universe.
AES is a designer and fabricator of particle accelerators or their components. They are machines Favale knows well. He spent 43 years at Grumman and its successor, Northrop Grumman -- he was director of advanced energy systems -- before leaving in 1998 to start his own company.
Northrop Grumman was focused on its core business building military airplanes -- not accelerators.
Favale, however, was convinced accelerators would play a big role in defense. He and some partners kicked in some money, secured some private funding and went to work in the late 1990s.
Some doubted they would succeed, thinking things like laser beam equipment to defend Navy ships was little more than the stuff of Buck Rogers.
But privately held AES is now a $13-million company, double what it was only a year ago.
The company is working on some major projects. It has a $4.7-million contract to build an accelerator for a system that will be able to detect the presence of nuclear material aboard ships. It has a contract that could be as high as $8 million to develop accelerator components for a system that would use laser beams to destroy enemy missiles at sea. And it beat out France and Germany to win a contract with the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, which wants to use accelerators to study protein structures.
AES has 40 employees, having hired 13 in the last year. More hires are expected, Favale said.
Will AES ever change the sign outside the front door? "Noooo," Favale said. "It shows us going up rather than going down. It shows us climbing."
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