Dr. Jeff Welser, Vice President of IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, California oversees scientists and engineers performing exploratory and applied research at the home of the relational database and world’s first hard disk drive. Today the lab specializes in areas including: Watson technologies, storage systems, data management and analytics, nanotechnology, materials science, Web 2.0 technologies and IBM Smarter Planet projects, such as healthcare informatics, water desalination and electric car batteries. In his prior position, Dr. Welser was the Director of Strategy and Program Development for the Accelerated Discovery Lab and simultaneously the Director of Almaden Services Research, managing a portfolio of research into improved business processes, software and technology to enable IBM's Global Business and Technology Services organizations. Dr. Welser joined IBM Research in 1995, working on novel silicon devices at the T.J. Watson Research Center, and served as adjunct professor at Columbia University, teaching semiconductor device physics at the same time. In 2000, he took an assignment in IBM’s Technology Group, and then joined IBM Microelectronics in 2001, as leader of high-performance CMOS device design. In 2003, he was named Director of high-performance SOI and BEOL technology development, in addition to continuing work as the IBM Management Committee Leader for the Sony, Toshiba, and AMD development alliances. In late 2003, Welser returned to Research as the Director of Next Generation Technology Components, looking at technology, hardware, and software components for future IT systems. Starting in 2006, Welser was on assignment to the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) as the Director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), a consortium of leading U.S. Semiconductor firms which partners with NIST, NSF, and state governments to support university-based research on future nanoscale logic devices. Dr. Welser received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University . Welser holds 21 US Patents and has published over 75 technical papers and presentations. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, an IEEE Fellow, a member of the American Physical Society, and has served on numerous Federal agency and Congressional panels on advanced semiconductor technology.
