Abstract:

When I completed graduate school, I did not have a “master plan”. Instead, I left with a strong academic foundation and deep intellectual curiosity. That curious streak led me into academic research at universities and national laboratories, corporate R&D, and ultimately to co-found a multinational startup. built around a novel monocrystalline optical coating technology. Following more than a decade of successful commercialization, these “semiconductor supermirrors” now enable the world’s most stable laser systems for optical atomic clocks and promise to dramatically enhance the sensitivity of next-generation gravitational-wave detectors. In this talk, I will briefly describe the technology that underpins these advancements in precision metrology and will reflect honestly on a career full of pivots, growth, and a few surprises. Whether you are drawn to research, industry, or entrepreneurship, my aim is to show you how broad and exciting the landscape is for scientists and engineers willing to stay curious and take the occasional leap.

About Prof. Garrett Cole:

Garrett D. Cole completed his B.S. in materials engineering from Cal Poly SLO in 2001 and obtained his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in Electronic & Photonic Materials in 2005. He subsequently held positions including the first employee of Aerius Photonics LLC (acquired by FLIR), a postdoctoral staff member at LLNL, a Marie Curie Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation (headed by Anton Zeilinger, Physics Nobel Laureate 2022), and a university assistant at Universität Wien Fakultät für Physik. In 2012, Prof. Cole founded Crystalline Mirror Solutions (CMS), a quantum optomechanics spin-off commercializing semiconductor supermirrors for laser-based metrology and manufacturing. CMS was successfully acquired by Thorlabs in December 2019 and rebranded as Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions. In addition to numerous startup prizes, Dr. Cole received the LIGHT2015 Young Photonics Entrepreneur Award, a Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis (2016), an SPIE Prism Award (2017), and served as a Unesco Trust Science Champion (International Day of Light, 2021). For 2024, he was selected as a member of the Photonics100 and elected Fellow of Optica. In January 2026, he joined the Wyant College at the University of Arizona as an associate professor and the inaugural Nelson E. Claytor Endowed Chair in Optical Sciences.