The Glasgow arm of Coherent, a laser maker, which grew from a Strathclyde University spin-out and now leads the group's ultrafast laser work from the West of Scotland Science Park.
Coherent Scotland designs and builds ultrafast lasers, which fire extremely short pulses of light. Scientists use them to see inside living tissue, to inspect and cut microelectronics, and to study how materials behave. Its named products include the Chameleon Discovery LX, Axon and Astrella lasers and the Monaco and OPerA lasers, used in areas such as multiphoton microscopy, optogenetics (using light to switch nerve cells on and off) and spectroscopy. The company is a subsidiary of Coherent Corp. and calls its Glasgow site a Center of Excellence for ultrafast laser systems.
The story starts at the University of Strathclyde. In 1992 Professor Allister Ferguson and two former graduate students spun out Microlase Optical Systems from the university's work on single-frequency Ti:sapphire lasers. By the late 1990s it had about 20 staff, and in late 1999 Coherent Inc. bought it, creating Coherent Scotland Ltd. The Chameleon laser launched in 2003 and passed 1,000 systems shipped by 2010. We did not find a mission statement, but the company's stated aim is lasers with high reliability and performance.
Coherent Scotland is based at the West of Scotland Science Park in Glasgow. A new 32,000 square foot building with a clean room opened on 11 September 2003, when it employed 46 people under managing director Dr Graeme Malcolm. In April 2025 the company announced a centralised hub for all of Coherent's ultrafast laser development, manufacturing and customer work in Glasgow, with Darryl McCoy as vice president and general manager. Coherent is also listed among the firms in the Torbay Hi-Tech Cluster in Devon. Current Glasgow headcount is not given on the pages we read.
The company's careers page stresses continuous improvement, lean methods and getting staff involved in solving problems. It features a graduate apprentice mechanical engineer, a project manager and a production supervisor describing their work. Listed benefits include 30 days of annual leave, a 37.5 hour week with start times between 07:00 and 09:30, blended home and site working on request, pension matching up to 8%, private healthcare options and an on-site bistro. Those are company statements. The site is certified to ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 and was carbon neutral for its own direct emissions in the 2024 financial year, according to the company.
Coherent Scotland sits inside a Glasgow laser cluster that also includes M Squared Lasers, founded by Microlase's original founders in 2006, Thales Optronics and the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics. The roles you would find in a laser factory range from production and test technicians to mechanical, optical and software engineers, project managers and supervisors, with research and development sitting beside manufacturing on one site. That makes Glasgow a good place to see how a lab idea becomes a product that is shipped worldwide.
Website: www.coherent.com
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