Damon Diehl

As Director of Technology Integration, Damon Diehl works to ensure that the cohort teams establish deep, enduring roots in the Rochester community.
Damon has been active in the optics industry since he moved from Chicago to Rochester to begin graduate studies at The Institute of Optics.
Damon’s career crisscrossed with Nextcorps for over a decade.
Damon worked for the metrology company Lumetrics when it was still located at the original Nextcorps (then High Tech Rochester) facility, and while the chief scientist at ASE Optics, Damon’s lab was located in Nextcorps until Rochester Precision Optics acquired ASE in 2010.
Damon was at the helm of the Optical Systems Technology program at Monroe Community College during its “reboot” in 2012 (during which the program exploded from only 6 active students to running over-enrolled day and evening sections of every first-year class).
After a stint in the technology-centric marketing company Launch Team, Damon maneuvered back into optics as a pitch coach for the first Luminate cohort, and he joined the staff full-time in July 2019.
Damon earned his Ph.D.
in optical engineering at the University of Rochester Institute of Optics, and he holds a B.A.
in physics and mathematics from the University of Chicago.