All Fired Up: Meet Cornell’s Only Scientific Glassblower

Stories You May Like

Paws to Remember: When the Bear Mascot Had a Ladyfriend

Alum’s Big Red Memorabilia Collection Captures a Bygone Era

What Does Cornell Mean to You—In Five Words or Less?

An artist in his own right, staffer Sean Donlon makes bespoke equipment that facilitates discoveries by Big Red researchers

Editor’s note: This story was adapted from a feature in the Cornell Chronicle.

By Holly Hartigan

When Sean Donlon crafts a piece of scientific glassware, he thinks about how that piece of equipment might play a role in a great discovery. Cornell’s only scientific glassblower, he works with researchers who need glass instruments repaired, modified, or sometimes designed and made from scratch.

He applies craftsmanship, problem-solving, and a deep understanding of glass to support research and innovation.

“I’m not saying my glass work alone is going to cure cancer,” he says, “but it’s nice to be a part of a system where people are wanting to make a better world.”

As part of the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR), Donlon collaborates with researchers across the University, and with the general public. Glassware is important for many types of research, especially chemistry.

His work isn’t only with beakers, solvent bottles, and glass manifolds, though. Recently he made protective covers for cameras on a deep-sea submersible, and mosquito feeders designed to hold food for mosquitoes in the lab of Courtney Murdock, associate professor of entomology in CALS.

Hand-made mosquito feeders containing blood in a lab
The mosquito feeders that Donlon made for an entomology lab—seen here filled, with many hungry customers.

The feeders are a crucial piece of equipment—feeding captive mosquitoes that researchers use to study how climate change impacts viral load in mosquitoes carrying diseases like malaria and West Nile virus.

Donlon didn’t just replicate existing feeders; he made tweaks to the design that made them easier to use.

Donlon collaborates with researchers across the University, and with the general public.

“He’s very inquisitive about whatever anyone’s doing,” says Jared Skrotzki, a technician in the Murdock Lab, “and loves to try to understand why we’re doing it and what we’re expecting to get out of it.”

In a shop in the basement of S.T. Olin—the chemistry building near Baker Lab—Donlon heats glass objects with a hand torch that can reach temperatures over 5,000 °F as a lathe holds and spins the object.

Sean Donlon, Scientific Glass Blower for Cornell, works on bespoke lab instruments in the Olin Glass Shop.
At work in his shop in S.T. Olin.

He holds a small blow tube in his mouth that helps to inflate areas of the glass, but he can still chat as he works. He has a flow, even when the glass does unexpected things.

“It’s a humbling experience,” says Donlon, who has been at Cornell since June 2024. “You can be a master at something, but the temperament of glass is fragile, so it can always break. It’s such a physical dance with the material and the environment.”

It’s such a physical dance with the material and the environment.

It is increasingly unusual for universities to operate a glass shop with a full-time technician, according to Jon Shu, PhD ’03, associate director of CCMR.

Stories You May Like

Paws to Remember: When the Bear Mascot Had a Ladyfriend

Alum’s Big Red Memorabilia Collection Captures a Bygone Era

“Glassware inevitably breaks,” Shu says. “To have somebody in-house who can repair something within the week is a huge difference from having to send it out for repairs, which might take a month or two. And you don’t get that level of customization and improvement that Sean offers.”

In college, Donlon studied marine biology. During that time, he got into painting and printmaking. His mom, an artist, connected him to an artists’ collective studio where he tried out glassblowing.

Sean Donlon, Scientific Glass Blower for Cornell, creates creates blobby, mirror teapots, cups and sugar bowls that have been featured in magazines and fine art museums. Location: Sean's personal studio near Ithaca, NY.
Forming a teapot in his home studio.

“I was immediately fixed on glass,” Donlon says. “I was just so enamored with the material from the torches, the tools, the fire.”

He went on to run an art studio in Richmond, VA, where he took on scientific and glass repair jobs, and taught flameworking at Virginia Commonwealth University.

His scientific work informs his artistic practice, and vice versa.

At his home studio, his most prolific art is a series of melty, blobby teapots. Each teapot has its own personality, and when put together they resemble a quirky community.

His scientific work informs his artistic practice, and vice versa.

One of his pieces—52 square-ish, mirrored teapots nested together in a cube—is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ collection.

While the teapots look free-form, the margin of error while making them can be narrower than the pieces he works on in the scientific glass shop.

To get a curve to reflect the light in just the right way or a spout to curve elegantly, he has to work even more precisely.

A cube-shaped glass artwork
provided
Donlon’s 2023 artwork—simply titled Cube—is held by a Virginia museum.

“Getting those drips and the flow of the glass to look like it’s melting takes so much more work than just heating it up and hanging it down,” he says.

“You have to add glass and create a tiny tube and pull it just the right amount. It doesn’t just flow in that nature sometimes. It really has to be forced into that aesthetic.”

However, learning how to be precise enabled him to understand when he can let go.

“I was trying to make everything perfect, but then when I got there it was boring,” he says. “‘Perfect’ made an item that was completely dead. I needed to add some wrinkles and freckles and imperfections.”

(All images by Noël Heaney / Cornell University, unless otherwise indicated.)

Published June 26, 2025


Leave a Comment

Once your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Other stories You may like