John Fini is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at OFS Laboratories, and has been modeling and designing optical fibers there since 2002.  He developed resonant mode suppression strategies useful in a number of applications, and guided a family of these designs rapidly from concept to a successful commercial product for deployment of fiber to the home.  He discovered that bend distortion, previously ignored, is a critical phenomenon limiting the scaling of large-mode-area amplifier fibers, and proposed new design rules for mitigating this limitation.  His work on a wide variety of design problems builds on several numerical codes he developed in-house, and a curiosity for novel physics that emerges from microstructure and other advanced fibers.  He is the inventor of nine issued US patents with several pending and the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles.  He received his PhD at MIT in 2001, researching quantum solitons and polarization mode dispersion under Profs. Hermann Haus and Peter Hagelstein.