Chase Stamey learned engineering from his electrician father, in a backyard with a barn. He now works at Corning Incorporated on the polymer coatings that hold the optical fibers of the digital transformation together. Maybe those two things are more connected than you think.
Senior Development Engineer at Corning Incorporated
Most people think about optical fiber the way they think about copper wire. If it is intact and connected at both ends, it should work. That, Chase Stamey says, is the misconception he would most like to delete. Fiber is far more sensitive than that and connections require much greater precision than standard copper wiring. The materials around the glass are what make that precision possible, and they are what Chase works on. He comes at the challenge from an unusual angle, growing up with a father who was an electrician and a backyard barn as their R&D facility. “I had exposure to so many different materials,” he says, “because we built or repaired almost everything.”
Engineering was the default response to things that did not work. Or as his dad framed it:
Chase Stamey
That kind of hardware store philosophy shaped Chase’s inner problem-solver and – who knows – prepared him for a career at Corning, where he now works on the polymer coatings that let optical fiber survive its job in the world. The fiber, in 2026, is the picture on the wall. The coatings are the pipes you don’t see.
It has been a landmark year for Corning that has both signed a multi-year agreement with Meta to supply fiber and cable into their domestic AI data center expansion and unveiled a multicore fiber packing four light-carrying paths into the same outer diameter as a conventional single-core fiber. That asks a lot of the materials inside the fiber in the layer that Chase works on. This is where the AI infrastructure conversation stops being about deals, press releases and conference unveils and starts being about chemistry.
Corning’s R&D operation at Sullivan Park in upstate New York runs the kind of long-cycle programs that produced the first low-loss optical fiber in 1970, the fusion process that makes the ultra-thin glass used in displays, and the chemically strengthened glass on most of the world’s smartphones. The polymer coating work Chase is part of sits inside that engine.
The same engine produced the multicore fiber that has just been unveiled. From the materials side, it pushes the edge of what previous fiber designs have ever asked of manufacturing: thinner coatings, geometric tolerances that single-core production never needed to hit, and process IP being invented alongside the design itself. Corning is one of the few places in the world where innovation, processing, and manufacturing live in the same building. Chase reduces the engineering shift to one sentence:
Chase Stamey
Multicore fiber is where that pressure shows up most clearly. On the materials side specifically, he explains: “The coatings have to be thinner, and because the cores aren’t centered anymore, they don’t all see the same stress when the fiber bends. That asymmetry means the glass and coating system have to be designed for stress conditions that do not exist in a conventional fiber.
Today, Chase’s focus is on product rollout, transitioning R&D into designs and processes, prioritizing scale-up problems. What he has learned is to take small anomalies seriously.
“School and textbooks lay out consistent problems with a designed solution,” he says. “But the little oddities are the real-world problems that aren’t accounted for in generalized formulas and thought experiments. The number of times those small oddities can lead to large improvements has been surprising to me.”
That rule traces back to the same place: a backyard barn and a father who did not have the luxury of writing off a thing that did not work as a fluke. In a household where you fix everything yourself, the oddity is the diagnosis.
The way Chase thinks has come back into fashion. The conversation has shifted toward repair, durability, and longevity. That is exactly what Chase does. Optical fiber coatings are durability chemistry, what lets fiber survive bending, thermal cycling, and the decades of operational life infrastructure expects.
Corning has been a materials science company for 175 years and is built on the same principle. Chase, who has been at Corning for a short time, is both inheriting from that compound and adding to it. He has no problem with people calling him stubborn, and concludes:
Chase Stamey
Senior Development Engineer at Corning Incorporated, working on the polymer coatings used on optical fiber. PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida, with doctoral research on nanoscopic and microscopic coatings and on polymer composites for energy efficiency and optics. Worked in residential and commercial construction before moving into industrial research and development.
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