Featured by Amazon Web Services
Cloud Educator · U.S. Air Force Officer · Builder of Builders
Amazon Web Services · “AWS Academy Helps QCC Train the Next Generation of Diverse Builders” · watch on YouTube
A moment in time
For a season, Amazon Web Services pointed its camera at a community-college classroom in Queens — and at the professor who had turned it into a launchpad for the cloud workforce. This page preserves that chapter: the work, the numbers, and the words AWS used to tell it.
The AWS chapter · Queensborough Community College
After discovering AWS Academy in 2018, Mike Lawrence built one of the most productive cloud-education programs in the City University of New York — and brought five fellow instructors along with him, all AWS-certified.
“The AWS Academy material provides the what, while I talk about why that what is important.”
“Folks at AWS are doing something incredible and wonderful — teaching students vital skills to get them better employment prospects instead of being stuck in dead-end jobs.”
— from the AWS case study, “Training the Next Generation of Builders at Queensborough Community College.”
The other pillar · advanced manufacturing
Mike was the principal designer of Queensborough's Advanced Manufacturing Lab, architecting its additive-manufacturing heart — production-grade 3D printing in everything from PLA and nylon to polycarbonate, ULTEM and PolyJet photopolymers — together with its metrology and 3D-scanning / reverse-engineering and laser-processing capabilities. (The lab also houses a full subtractive machining floor.)
CUNY Queensborough · “3D Printing Lab Transforms Lives” · watch on YouTube
“What we have is a million-dollar lab that is unique and unlike almost any other lab in the world today at a college.”
The impact is literal. The lab has 3D-printed patient-specific anatomical models for Memorial Sloan Kettering, St. Jude’s, Children’s Hospital in Omaha, and St. Mary’s Hospital in Connecticut — and research models for the University of Texas at El Paso. During the COVID-19 pandemic the lab produced life-saving medical equipment, and students have built NSF-funded work here, like Mateo Saenz’s emergency-response drone.
The arc
Credentials
Research & recognition
Education: B.S., Astronautical Engineering — U.S. Air Force Academy · A.S., Internet & Information Technology — Queensborough Community College.
Research interests: Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence · Advanced Manufacturing & Fabrication · 3D Printing.
Grants & honors: NSF I-Corps Principal Investigator (Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Ecosystem Technology) · WiTNY — Women in Technology grant · CUNY PSC awards · CUNY Research Scholar Program mentor.
Faculty profile: Engineering Technology Department, Queensborough Community College (CUNY) — faculty since 2014.
Institutional validation
A 2023 Business–Higher Education Forum case study, How CUNY Partnered with Amazon to Increase Economic Mobility, singled out Queensborough — the program Mike leads — as “the most prominent partnership” in CUNY's work with AWS, with more than 7,000 New Yorkers enrolling in QCC's cloud and IT credential courses since 2022.
These are gifts, and I hold them as stewardship — not as my foundation. The same standard of excellence I learned launching satellites and teaching the cloud, I now bring to a greater commission: the Gospel, and the harvest God is orchestrating.
“But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.” — Philippians 3:7