May 19, 2025
John Ballato of Clemson University is one of the globe’s most respected and influential optical-fiber researchers, but go back a little over four decades, and he was a boy crawling onto his father’s lap to watch him write equations and draw circuits in the office of their New Jersey home.
What John couldn’t have understood then was that his father, Art, was doing some of the work that would help underlie modern wireless communications and electronics, including Global Positioning Systems and laptop computers.
John credits those early interactions with helping form the origins of his own career by instilling a fascination with how nature works.
Like many sons, John followed his father’s path, but what is rare is that both became highly successful in complementary yet different fields of engineering.
They have been working together as peers as far back as the 1990s. In addition to the over 1,000 scientific articles they have cumulatively published separately they have co-authored several papers together, including at least 11 in the past 10 years. The Ballatos together account for more than 100 patents, including one they share.
Their work together shows how seeds planted early can sprout in unexpected ways and produce fruits years later that no one could have predicted.
“In the physics and mathematics, there was just a beauty in the way they were written,” John recalled of those early days at his father’s desk side. “He would be working, and he would try to explain it to me, and I wouldn’t understand it. But nonetheless it was something that stuck.”
Those early experiences would eventually lead John to Clemson’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he is now the J.E. Sirrine Chair in Optical Fiber. He has received just about every honor someone in his field can win, reflecting a career of rare influence and impact.
