Management Team

Doug is the Founder, CTO, and former President of PGL. Previously, he was the Director of Coating Development at Vacuum Process Technology. As Director of Coating Development, he was responsible for design, fabrication, and characterization of grating and coating processes. Earlier in his career Doug was Group Leader of Optical Manufacturing in the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester for 17 years. He gained a great deal of experience in optics for large lasers here. While in Rochester, Doug taught courses on Optical Thin Films both during the academic year to industry and in the summer and prior to that, he was Vice-president of Production at Omega Optical for 7 years.

Doug graduated with honors from Marlboro College (majoring in Optics) in 1975 and received a Master’s degree in Optics from the University of Arizona in 1986. He is the author of over 28 papers in coating technology. Doug is a member of the Optical Society of America and has served as the chair of the Optical Thin Films Group on the Technical Council. Doug has been co-chair of the OSA Optical Interference Topical Conference and has participated in the education program of the OSA Rochester Section. While in Rochester, Doug was a lecturer with The Institute of Optics where he taught a course on Optical Thin Films and continues to teach in the Summer Course series. He is also a member of SPIE and the Society of Vacuum Coaters (SVC), and has served on the Board of Directors for the SVC.

Turan Erdogan is the President of Plymouth Grating Lab, succeeding the founder of PGL, Doug Smith. He has been studying, teaching, and practicing optics for 30 years. Prior to joining PGL, Turan 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 since 2011 as the CTO and VP of Business Development for the IDEX Optics & Photonics platform. In 2000, Turan co-founded Semrock, Inc., which was acquired by IDEX in 2008. Semrock revolutionized the manufacturing of high-performance thin-film optical filters for fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy applications.

Prior to Semrock, he was a tenured professor at The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, where he joined in 1994. There he conducted research primarily on fiber and waveguide devices and holographic optical materials. From 1992 to 1994 he was a post-doctoral researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he conducted research on the physics of ultraviolet photosensitivity in germanium-doped silica optical fibers, planar waveguides, and bulk glasses, and developed numerous applications of fiber Bragg grating technology for precise wavelength control in DWDM communications systems. He has a Ph.D. from The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, and B.S. Degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Turan 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 about half of these covering optical devices in mass production today. He is a member of the Optical Society of America and currently serves on the Board of Directors.