John H Bruning earned a BS in electrical engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 1964, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1967 and 1969 respectively.

He began his career at Bell Labs working on high accuracy interferometry for testing optical surfaces and lenses. In 1984, he moved to Tropel where he would eventually become President and CEO. Under his leadership, the company was taken private and grown from a $10 million to $25 million a year business. Tropel was later merged with Corning.

For his work, Bruning has received many recognitions and honors. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and received the 1993 David Richardson Medal from OSA. He is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, and the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers. In 1997, he served as President of the American Society for Precision Engineering.