A life engineered
in four movements.

The engineer, in formation.

Peter Volanakis was born into the post-war generation that would inherit — and remake — the American manufacturing economy. He pursued undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College, drawn to the discipline not as a collection of formulas but as a language for translating physical reality into productive systems. He went on to earn his MBA from the Tuck School of Business, pairing engineering instinct with operating discipline.

What distinguished him, even as a young engineer, was a preference for the line over the whiteboard. He understood early that the most important information in any industrial business lives not in a strategy document but in the micro-decisions taken on the factory floor — the decisions that make the difference between a prototype and a product, between a theory of operations and a working one.

In 1982, he joined Corning Incorporated. It would become the defining institution of his professional life.

The rise at Corning.

Over the next two decades, Peter moved through a sequence of roles that gave him an unusually complete education in a complex, materials-intensive business. Process engineer. Plant manager. Commercial leader. Business president. Every role taught him something the last could not: the cost of a tenth-of-a-percent yield loss, the politics of a joint venture, the optical physics behind a wavelength of light.

He led Corning's display technologies business during the formative years of the global LCD market — a market most industrial incumbents missed, and which Corning, quietly and methodically, came to dominate. Under his leadership, the business developed the process know-how, the strategic partnerships and the capital discipline to scale from a specialty line into a multi-billion-dollar global engine, powering a generation of flat-panel displays in televisions, laptops, and later, the devices we now call phones.

This was not the work of a single product decision. It was the work of a thousand small choices — the kind of patient, disciplined operating rhythm that distinguishes the industrial class of American executive Peter came to represent.

President & Chief Operating Officer.

In April 2007, Peter was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer of Corning Incorporated. He assumed responsibility for the company's global operations at a moment when the world was about to change again — the iPhone had just been announced, the global financial system was about to be tested, and the very definition of "industrial" was about to be rewritten by materials no one yet knew they needed.

As President and COO, he oversaw Corning's businesses and manufacturing, technology and engineering organizations. He brought the company through the 2008–2009 downturn with its investment culture intact, its research engine funded, and its commitment to long-cycle innovation undiluted. In an era when many industrial firms retreated into short-term defensiveness, Corning kept building — and the Gorilla® Glass business, among others, is the living proof.

He retired from his operating role in 2010, concluding twenty-eight years of continuous service to Corning Incorporated.