Ron Gerber is an optical engineer and patent agent with over ten years experience designing, modeling, tolerancing and documenting optical and mechanical systems for the data storage and telecommunications industries. As an inventor, he has over 22 U.S. patents to his name.

Prior to joining Altera Law Group, Ron was a Senior Project Engineer at ADC Telecommunications, where he was a design engineer for fiber optic assemblies. He was also a Senior Engineer at Seagate Technology, working on a variety of projects from optically-assisted Winchester drives and their components to design of air bearing surfaces for hard drives. Ron was a Senior Research Scientist at Eastman Kodak, working on current and future generation CD-R products. Early in his career he worked on future-generation magneto-optical disc storage at 3M, and developed a methodology for testing lithography lenses at IBM.

Ron's technical expertise includes:

• Computer simulation of optical systems using raytracing, Gaussian beam analysis and diffraction modeling, using primarily self-written code in MATLAB and Excel in addition to off-the-shelf code (ZEMAX, OSLO, Code V)
• Mechanical budget analysis, from the tolerances on individual components to the predicted performance of higher, system-level assemblies
• Design, tolerancing, and development of a manufacturing process for optical components in telecommunications
• Fundamental research in optical data storage, including both theoretical and experimental investigation of the effects of polarization orientation, disk birefringence and disk tilt on the focus and tracking subsystems of CD, CD-R, MO, DVD and DVD-R systems
• Design of air bearing surfaces for computer hard drives, using code that finds a steady-state solution of the Reynolds equation

Ron has given talks at several technical conferences and has authored 11 papers in referenced technical journals.

For fun, Ron volunteers at radio station KFAI-FM in Minneapolis, where he serves as Treasurer, holds a seat on the Board of Directors, serves on the Programming Committee, and hosts a weekly, syndicated music show heard on eight stations on two continents.