Dr. Joel S. Birnbaum

The Special Technical Advisor to the Chairman and CEO of the Hewlett-Packard Company, reporting directly to Hewlett-Packard's President and Chairman, he is responsible for continuing to help the company shape its technology strategy and to communicate this strategy to the marketplace. Before assuming this role, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Development (R&D), responsible for the coordination of worldwide activities in R&D, and Director of HP Laboratories, both positions from which he retired in 1999. As a member of the management staff, he coordinated Hewlett-Packard's global research and development, directed central research, and acted as the technology spokesman for the company. One of the technologies developed under his direction was the precursor of Hewlett-Packard precision architecture, the basis for all Hewlett-Packard's RISC computers. In 1986, he was named General Manager of the Information Technology group. He was responsible for the development of all core hardware platforms and systems software for the precision architecture product line. He joined Hewlett-Packard in 1980 after 15 years at IBM Corporation's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he last served as Director of Computer Sciences. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the UK, a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology, a Sheffield Fellow of Yale University, and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery. He has been granted an honorary Doctorate by the Technion University of Israel and was the year 2000 winner of the IEEE Weber Prize, given for career engineering management achievement. His board memberships include the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Technion University of Israel, Veridian Corporation, Indigo Corporation, Hermes Softlabs, the Euphrat Museum of Art, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He also serves on advisory councils at Exemplary and Digital Archway corporations. In February of 2005, QLogic Corporation announced that he had been appointed to its Board of Directors. He also chairs the National Research Council Committee on Improving CyberSecurity research in the United States. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Nuclear Physics, both from Yale University. He obtained a B.S. degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University.