Sandra K. Johnson, Ph.D.

Sandra K. Johnson, Ph.D. has held many leadership positions within IBM Corporation and now works to align the company's products and technologies with industry-specific solutions, as senior technical staff member and chief technology officer of Global Small and Medium Business for the Systems and Technology Group. Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Johnson was a critical member of the design team that prototyped the IBM Scalable Parallel Processor, the base machine for IBM's famous "Deep Blue" chess machine. A research division master inventor, she has been awarded 11 patents and has four pending, has cowritten more than 25 publications, and is editor in chief of the book "Linux Server Performance Tuning," scheduled for publication this fall. Her contributions and leadership won her election to the prestigious IBM Academy of Technology, which consists of the top 300 technologists in the business. She has won numerous awards, including the 1998 Women of Color Technology Award for Research Leadership. Dr. Johnson mentors IBM employees, including many HBCU graduates, and is a member of the Morgan State University School of Engineering Advisory Board. She graduated summa cum laude from Southern University with a degree in electrical engineering in 1982. Two years later, she received a master's degree from Stanford University, also in electrical engineering, and later earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Rice University.