Biography
John Cowles is a registered Patent Agent with more than 40 years of significant and varied engineering, management and consulting experience, including in areas such as design, analysis, testing and manufacturing. He has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and is known as a customer-oriented problem solver who consistently delivers innovative solutions for his clients as well as mentoring younger engineers under his supervision. John is a member of the firm’s Intellectual Property & Technology Group and a Connecticut Professional Engineer.
John’s background includes experience as a manager and director of groups focused on new products, advanced materials and process development, directing teams of engineers and technicians and heading up research and development in new technologies related to software development, materials, testing and manufacturing. He has a strong track record of successfully developing plans that support strategic and marketing objectives that meet the twin goals of manufacturing excellence and achieving return on investment. In the course of that work, John has overseen the execution of hundreds of U.S. as well as international patent applications and amendments, maintaining regular correspondence with patent attorneys and responding to patent office actions. Most recently, he was the lead organizer of a series of well-received symposia that shared cross-functional knowledge on specific topics, including manufacturing, rolling element and self-lubricating bearings, sealing technology, testing, and overall design and technology.
As a function of those management responsibilities, John consistently worked to ensure appropriate staffing of programs and high quality of technical deliverables, developed project team structure that enhanced the training and mentoring of junior engineers, oversaw compliance to internally-developed processes and procedures, developed and maintained clear roles and responsibilities, and tracked analytical group financial performance metrics in a timely manner. John also oversaw the development of software to integrate with existing computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) packages enabling a highly-efficient design system. In addition, his experience features the design and production of an easy-to-use graphical-user-interface to automate engineering analyses and reduce design cycles by integrating design and finite element analysis.