1. You’ve been with Corning since 2002 with different responsibilities. What does your current position entail and how have these previous roles shaped your outlook on this role?
In my current role, I lead a team of professionals focused on providing optical systems and connectivity solutions for the aerospace and defense market. My focus includes assessment of the market and the competitive and technical environment. Over the past 100 years, Corning has proven that we know how to navigate the aerospace and defense market and we can reliability deliver quality solutions.
When I joined Corning in 2002, my first job was in a manufacturing facility in technical sales. Being on the factory floor helped me gain operational and people management experience and gave me a greater perspective of how Corning invents, makes and sells our unique solutions.
During my career at Corning, I have focused on leading the commercial activities of our business units participating in the aerospace and defense market. And over time, we began to look at these product lines strategically as one business unit. Anything we sold into the military fell under my guidance. Soon thereafter, I took a commercial strategy role, primarily merger and acquisition planning, as well as five-year deep dive planning. My work there strengthened our portfolio, particularly in EO/IR, hyperspectral imaging and microwave connectivity and helped pave the way for my current role as the business director of Corning’s growing Aerospace & Defense business unit.
2. Corning is a recognizable company name with roots going back more than 170 years. It began as a glass company but has diversified well beyond glass. Could you provide some insights into how the company evolved during your time with Corning?
We have a 170-year history of solving difficult problems and improving people’s lives. From helping a young inventor named Thomas Edison produce the first glass light bulbs in 1879 to inventing the world’s first low loss optical fiber in 1970, Corning innovation is embedded in nearly every part of our daily lives.
And our technology is often synergistic with commercial and defense applications. Take cathode ray tubes as an example. We supplied cathode ray tubes (CRTs) during World War II for defense radars and then developed a process to mass produce CRTs for television sets in the 1950s. Corning's understanding of the television industry, combined with its revolutionary method for creating advanced flat glass, led to early and sustained success enabling LCD televisions.
I’m proud that Corning is one of the few global companies that continues to engage in exploratory research, with more than $1 billion invested annually in RD&E. We’re always looking to solve challenging problems that make the world a better place.
3. Your job experience is weighted toward the aerospace and defense sector. Can you tell us about Corning’s involvement in that market? What types of opportunities do you target and with what product portfolio?
We serve the aerospace and defense markets from components all the way through integrated systems. From a market perspective, our product areas cover intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, electro-optical and infrared and electronic warfare systems for both radars and emitters.
Specific solutions include glass ceramic radar transmissive missile nose cones and large aperture mirrors for ground-based astronomy. One of our more advanced system integration capabilities is electro-optical and infrared camera systems. We're a leader in multispectral and hyperspectral payloads where we offer fully integrated camera, telescope and spectrometer systems.
And finally, we have our growing microwave business, Corning® Gilbert®. This business evolved out of our Gilbert engineering group, known for their Gilbert push-on interconnects or GPO® family, which has been an industry standard within the microwave community for more than 60 years. Most recently, we’ve seen strong demand for our microwave and RF connectors and we can trace that back to the evolution of our connectors, which are becoming smaller, denser and offer higher frequencies. We’re well-positioned to respond to the industry’s demand for solutions optimized for size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C).
4. Can you give the readers some of Corning's “metrics” (number of facilities, number of employees, square footage of facilities, locations, etc.) and how your group fits into that structure?
Corning is one of the world’s leading innovators in materials science. We have 77 manufacturing sites, 52,000 employees and 10 R&D facilities worldwide. In 2023, our core sales were $13.6 billion and Corning Incorporated was ranked 343 on the Fortune 500 ranking.
I tell our customers that it’s the best of both worlds. Corning is a global material science innovator, yet at the same time, our business units have the flexibility to stay close to our customers and serve our market segments. Across Corning’s diverse businesses, we often share best practices, technologies, manufacturing strategies and talent, which helps us deliver solutions with industry-leading SWaP-C with, oftentimes, shorter development times.
5. You’ve been involved with merger and acquisition activity at Corning. Can you describe how M&A activities contribute to Corning’s and your group’s growth strategy? What are your thoughts on organic growth versus acquisitions for the company moving forward?
For Corning as a whole, we tend to prioritize organic growth. However, we have a corporate development team that actively engages and looks for opportunities for both joint venture partnerships and acquisitions. For aerospace and defense, we're open to opportunities that are synergistic with our current operations. For our microwave business, our focus is to continue our organic growth to support the strong market demand. To do this, we’re investing capital and adding people to support existing programs and new development opportunities.
6. At IMS2024, you announced the industry’s first plated polymer connector. What can you tell us about POLYLINK and the product portfolio, in general, for your group? How has it evolved under your leadership? How do you envision your portfolio changing in the future?
Through our Corning Gilbert business, we offer more than 10,000+ cable connectors, edge and flange mounts, interconnects and PCB mounts with center-to-center spacing as low as 0.07 in. and weight as low as.0005 grams. And we’re continuing to listen to and evolve to our customers’ needs with new product innovation. Personally, I find it fulfilling when I talk to customers and hear that they appreciate that we’ve listened to their challenges and are working on developing a solution.
Corning Gilbert POLYLINKTM connector technology is an innovation that is a direct result of customer feedback. Our commercial customers came to us asking for a lower-cost solution with axial compressibility, lower weight and more flexibility for drone and one-time-use applications. While the use of plastics is not new, the use of them in RF applications presents challenges. Our talented engineering team, who have a combined 200 years of experience, helped invent a microwave industry-first: a gold-plated plastic microwave connector that we are calling POLYLINK. This technology will help minimize costs and maximize installation flexibility for our customers.
And we have more in the portfolio. To me, our advanced, compression-style interconnect system is one of the more exciting innovations that we have in the pipeline and it represents the next generation of interconnect for application in multi-pin interconnects and cryogenic work. In the future, we plan to roll out this advanced compression-style interconnect system which offers increased predictability, improved performance and increased flexibility with a smaller size. This is the next product hierarchy for the future, building off the legacy of the G4PO™, G3PO™, GPPO® and GPO lines. Additionally, with precision machining capabilities, this product is more consistent and precise than ever before.
7. Where are you spending your development resources? What products, applications and technologies excite you most?
When it comes to development, our top priority is listening to our customers, understanding their problem statements and aligning our development activities around those inputs. Ultimately, evolving our technologies and product offerings with our customers is paramount.
The second area of focus is standardization. The industry is trending toward an open system architecture concept, MOSA and SOSA, what I like to call “plug-and-play solutions.” We’re participating on this path to standardization and our customers are guiding us toward their needs.
Our third focus area is continuing our culture and spirit of innovation. Corning’s capabilities are versatile and synergistic, which allows us to share engineering and design best practices and systems from across the company to help our customers capture new opportunities and evolve with them. In the microwave space, we share mechanical engineers across our division and we’ve experienced wonderful learnings. For example, an engineer working on EO/IR systems can apply what they know about flexure design there and apply it for improving connectors for the microwave industry.
8. Can you describe the market focus of your group? Who are your important customers and market segments and how do you see this changing in the future?
Corning has an extensive history of working with electronic warfare market industry leaders on MW/RF connectivity solutions. We also prioritize opportunities in telecommunications, 5G and commercial opportunities. We continually supply solutions that meet the industry’s technological roadmaps. Solving tough technology problems is what Corning does best and we’re excited to collaborate with industry leaders to deliver new solutions and technologies that help meet their evolving needs.
9. What else would you like our readers to know about Corning and your group?
Corning is a solution provider from materials and components all the way through to integrated systems. We operate best when customers bring us in early and often into their development cycle. We have a deep bench of both engineers and scientists supporting our defense businesses.