April 14, 2006
If there were a gene for
optics, Thomas R. Sloan would possess it. Five generations
of ancestors on his father’s side have been in the
optics industry, first in Germany and later in the United
States. Sloan recently honored that general heritage and
his specific connections to the Institute of Optics with
a $1 million donation to the new Optics/BME building.
The building’s auditorium will be named after him.
“I’ve been
very blessed in life and I’m delighted to be able
to give something back to the Institute,” Sloan
says. “My family has been involved for generations
in optics…primarily optics for vision correction.
In a sense, eyeglasses and contact lenses are biomedical-optics
appliances—maybe the first such appliances. I’m
very excited about this building project and the links
it creates between the Institute and biomedical engineering.”
Sloan grew up around
optics. In high school he worked in the laboratory of
Southern Optical Co., founded by his father Harry Sloan
in 1938 when he emigrated to the US to escape the Nazi
regime. His father created his company using the training
he had obtained at the prestigious Jena University, the
home of optics pioneers Karl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe.
Sloan attended Rochester
in the 1960s, earning his BS in 1965, and a master’s
degree from The Institute in 1967.
“Rochester taught
me how to think, and how to solve problems in a strategic
sense,” he says.
From UR he went to Boston
to work at Itek, pursuing his MBA in the evenings. In
1970 he returned to his roots in Greensboro, North Carolina
to join his father’s company. He became president
of Southern Optical in 1975. Starting with a sales base
of roughly $2 million, over the course of his 30 year
career he expanded the business throughout the southeastern
US, sold the company at one point while continuing to
run it for the new public ownership, and then reacquired
it in the late 1980s. In 1996, the company, with sales
of about $75 million, was purchased by the French ophthalmics
giant Essilor, and Sloan was made head of the newly formed
division - Essilor Laboratories of America (sales today
over $500 million).
In recent years Sloan
has scaled back his efforts at Essilor and has plunged
into a variety of entrepreneurial activities for both
profit and non-profit entities. He has helped launch a
number of health-related startup companies such as Mercury
MD and Mediwave Star Technology. He’s also chairman
of SterlingSouth Bank and Trust, a bank he helped to form.
In addition, he is very active in numerous local community
organizations including recent terms on the board of the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Moses Cone
Health System.
“I really enjoy the entrepreneurial
challenge of start-up companies and small organizations,”
he says. “I don’t use the word ‘retired’
in any sense.”
The picture above shows Thomas Sloan standing
in the future Sloan Auditorium.
Text by Steve Braun
Photo by Betsy Benedict
©2006 University
of Rochester
