Gary Colquhoun

• Centre Advisory Board
• @garycolquhoun/

Gary Colquhoun has over 25 years of experience working at the interface of industry, academia, and government. Throughout his career, he has served as a technology company founder, director, facilitator, mentor, and CEO, with a strong focus on building collaborative relationships between academia and industry and driving the development of new products, processes, and services through research and innovation.

Gary’s background is in photonics and laser engineering, and his work has spanned a diverse range of applications. His experience includes the search for exoplanets, developing technologies to protect fighter jet pilots from laser-guided threats, authenticating Scottish whisky, enhancing mushroom crop production, and applying photonics sensing technologies to environmental and industrial challenges. He founded and grew Fibre Photonics Ltd, supporting customers including BAE Systems, Leonardo, ABB Analytical, Thermo, Diageo, Syngenta, BP Chemicals, Pfizer, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, and the European Space Agency.

He has also worked as a Defence Industry Adviser with the Office of Defence Industry Support.

Gary has previously held roles as Director of the Scottish Optoelectronics Association and as European Photonics Industry Liaison Manager with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics technologies.