Diane P. Pozefsky

Leader of the IBM team that developed APPN and AnyNet architectures, which broke the barriers between TCP/IP and SNA networking technologies, Pozefsky was named an IBM Fellow in 1994 in recognition of this work and also an IBM Master Inventor, and was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology.

After earning a Sc.B. Degree in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1972, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UNC in 1979 under the tutelage of Doctor Mehdi Jazayeri, she joined IBM Corporation in Raleigh, NC as a member of the Communication Systems Architecture Department. Her early work, driven by the introduction of personal computers and enhanced capabilities, allowed the addition and movement of data and transformed networking technology to allow networks to change and adapt more easily. Pozefsky worked in the specification and application of the Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a large and complex feature-rich network architecture developed in the 1970s by IBM. SNA is similar in some respects to the OSI reference model, but with a number of differences, and is essentially composed of seven layers.

In the early nineties, as corporations moved toward TCP/IP networks, she developed the AnyNet technology, which broke the barriers between the two networking technologies. This technology allowed programs designed for one type of network to work on the other and allowed users to build networks that employed either or both technologies. In the late nineties, Pozefsky changed her focus to building networks for the 1998 Nagano Olympics and the IBM Corporation.

Her life's work has been largely focused on networking and software engineering, including developing networking protocols, development processes, storage networking, application development, and mobile computing. She has worked in development, design, and architecture, and two areas that she became particularly interested in later in her career were improving quality and blending theory and practice. In her 25 years with IBM, her work on networking architectures and development earned eight formal Achievement Awards. Pozefsky was awarded the Women in Technology International (WITI) 2011 Hall of Fame Award for contributions to the fields of Science and Technology.

After retiring from IBM in June 2004, she returned to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a visiting research professor in the Computer Science Department. Her teaching and research interests have included software engineering, user interfaces, the use of technology in entrepreneurships, and the social impacts of technology. She has been heavily involved in the IBM Academy of Technology, an organization comprised of technical leaders in IBM, and has actively promoted National Engineers Week and Women in Technology conferences for the corporation and in North Carolina.

Pozefsky is the author or co-author of numerous publications, including: "Storage Networking: More than an SNA Anagram" in NCP and 3745/46 Today, Summer 2001; "SNA's Design for Networking" with D. Pitt and J. Gray, IEEE Network volume 6 number 6, pp. 16–31, November 1992; "Efficient Multipass Evaluation of Attribute Grammars Without a Parse Tree," Proceedings 1977 Conference Information Sciences and Systems, Johns Hopkins University, pp. 184–89, March 30–April 1, 1977; and "Systems Programming Languages" with Bergeron et al. (as Shecter) in Advances in Computers 12, pp. 175–284, 1972. She is the holder of several U.S. patents.