Turan Erdogan received his S.B. in electrical Engineering from MIT in 1987. He went on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1992. He completed postdoctoral work at AT&T Bell Labs. Following his education, Erdogan became a professor at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, where he worked from 1994 to 2000. In 2000, he co-founded Semrock, Inc., in Rochester, New York. The company was acquired in 2008 by IDEX Corp. In the following years, Erdogan became the CTO and VP of Buisness Development for IDEX Optics & Photonics and IDEX Health & Science. He remained in that position until 2016. For two years, he worked at the site leader for Melles Griot, and most recently, he became the President of Plymouth Grating Laboratory, Inc.

He has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and over 50 major conference talks, and he holds more than 30 issued patents, with about half of these covering optical devices in mass production today. He is a Fellow of OSA, and received the 1995 Adolph Lomb Medal “for application of electron-beam lithography to fabrication of circular diffraction gratings and demonstration of a surface-emitting semiconductor laser based on these gratings.”