Turan Erdogan
About Optica
Turan Erdogan
Plymouth Grating Laboratory, Inc., USA
Turan Erdogan has been studying, teaching, and practicing optics for 40 years. He is currently President of Plymouth Grating Laboratory, Inc. (PGL) in Carver, MA, the leading commercial supplier of diffraction gratings for pulse compression of ultrahigh-intensity lasers, for high-energy-laser spectral beam combining, and for other laser applications. Prior to joining PGL in 2016, Erdogan was the Site Leader of Melles Griot in Rochester, New York, a leading provider of high-performance lens assemblies and optical systems for biological imaging, semiconductor metrology, and other applications. He also served from 2011 to 2016 as the CTO and Vice President of Business Development for the IDEX Optics & Photonics platform.
In 2000, Erdogan co-founded Semrock, Inc., which was acquired by IDEX in 2008. Semrock revolutionized the manufacturing of high-performance thin-film optical filters for fluorescence imaging and detection and Raman spectroscopy applications. Prior to Semrock, he was a tenured professor at The Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester, where he joined in 1994. There, he conducted research on fiber and waveguide devices and holographic optical materials. He taught courses offered to freshman through advanced graduate students and supervised both undergraduate and graduate research associates, graduating a number of Ph.D. students who have gone on to make their own marks in the world of optics. He also consulted with numerous companies around the world on Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) fiber-optic communications components and devices.
From 1992 to 1994, Erdogan was a post-doctoral researcher at Bell Laboratories, then part of AT&T. There, he developed numerous applications of fiber Bragg grating technology for precise wavelength control in DWDM communications systems and conducted research on the physics of ultraviolet photosensitivity in germanium-doped silica optical fibers, planar waveguides, and bulk glasses. He has a PhD from The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and over 50 major conference talks, and holds more than 30 issued patents, with more than half of these covering optical devices in mass production today.
Erdogan has served as Program and General Chair of several major Optica (formerly OSA) conferences, including the FiO-LS Conference, the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) Conference, and the Bragg Gratings, Photosensitivity, and Poling in Glass Waveguides Topical Meeting. He has also served on a number of other conference organizing committees, the Rochester Section of the OSA, several Optica awards committees, several Optica councils, and the Optica (formerly OSA) Board of Directors.
He was awarded Optica’s David Richardson Medal, the Adolph Lomb Medal of the Optical Society of America, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics, and a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award. In addition, he was named a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 1999. He lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with his wife and has four grown children.
