Tolga Kurtoglu named CEO of PARC

Dr. Tolga Kurtoglu has been named chief executive officer of PARC, a Xerox company based in Palo Alto, CA. Kurtoglu’s appointment, which was announced on January 10, follows previous CEO Stephen Hoover, who was promoted to CTO of Xerox Corporation, responsible for research, development and engineering, reporting to Jeff Jacobson, CEO of Xerox Corporation following the company’s separation.

Prior to his promotion to CEO, Kurtoglu held the position of PARC vice president and director of the System Sciences Lab (SSL), where he was responsible for PARC’s research portfolio in artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, geometric reasoning, modeling and simulation, and cyber-physical security. Technologies developed in SSL served a variety of clients from Product Lifecycle Management, Energy, Transportation, and Automotive to Aerospace and Defense sectors. Dr. Ersin Uzun, formerly PARC vice president and director of the Computing Science Laboratory, will assume Kurtoglu’s prior responsibilities and will lead the combined organization as vice president and director of the System Sciences Laboratory.

Kurtoglu joined PARC in 2010 and has held various leadership roles focusing on product strategy and technology commercialization to manage the transition of new technologies from an R&D output to production-quality software systems and services. Prior to PARC, he was a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, and a mechanical design engineer at Dell Corporation.

“It has been a pleasure working with Tolga and I’ve been very impressed with his impact at PARC,” said Stephen Hoover, CTO of Xerox. “Tolga has the very unique leadership qualities necessary to run a place like PARC. He combines deep technical expertise with a keen understanding of customer needs, and he is a confident leader who also leads with respect and humility. This combination brings out the best in the highly capable entrepreneurial scientists, engineers and business people we have at PARC. I am confident Tolga will continue to advance our mission of creating and commercializing the breakthrough innovations that PARC brings to Xerox and our open innovation partners in the commercial and government research sectors.”

Kurtoglu received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, both in Mechanical Engineering.

“I am thrilled to take on the CEO responsibility at PARC and continue to advance the scientific breakthroughs that we’re creating here,” said Kurtoglu.

Source: PARC