IBM has elevated seven employees to IBM Fellow—its most prestigious technical honor—to acknowledge their important contributions and industry-leading innovations in developing some of the world's most important technologies.

"Technology innovation is at the core of everything we do to help our clients make the world work better," said Ginni Rometty, IBM president and chief executive officer. "IBM's 2012 Fellows represent the very best of this culture of innovation and I'm honored to recognize their outstanding accomplishments."

The seven employees who have earned the coveted distinction of IBM Fellow this year are:

Luba Cherbakov
IBM Enterprise Transformation - Bethesda, Md.
Luba Cherbakov is a driving force behind the creation and use of emerging technologies that have enabled the business transformation of both IBM and its clients. The areas where she has made significant contributions include Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture, Rivers-for-Tomorrow, Situational Applications Environment, The Genographic Project and IBM Virtual Spaces. She has played a leading role in IBM's entry into new market segments, and her groundbreaking research has helped IBM and its clients improve their internal operations while supporting growth in the marketplace. A mentor, teacher and sponsor, Luba is a highly regarded technical leader whose expertise is sought by customers and technical practitioners alike.

Paul Coteus
IBM Research - Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
Paul Coteus has made important contributions to memory, power, packaging and cooling for high speed computing systems. Paul's most notable accomplishments involve his work with Blue Gene. In 2004, BlueGene/L represented a remarkable breakthrough in supercomputer sustained performance, power efficiency and reliability. The 104 rack system with 212K processor cores is still running at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), thus enabling prodigious computing tasks that surpassed previous systems. A founding member and chief engineer of the Blue Gene project, Paul was responsible for the system's power, packaging and cooling, including the reliability of design.

Dr. Ronald Fagin
IBM Research - San Jose, Calif.
Dr. Ronald Fagin is a founder of relational database theory, the creator of the field of finite model theory, the author of seminal work in information integration and aggregation, and a thought leader in the field of reasoning about knowledge. He has advanced both the theory and practice of modern computing systems, especially data management systems. His key inventions include extendible hashing, widely used in database query processing; differential data backup, a key feature of Tivoli software, and critical tools for database design.

Vincent Hsu
IBM Systems and Technology Group - Tucson, Ariz.
Vincent Hsu has a long history of innovation in storage system architectures, creating workload optimized solutions through intelligent data placements and championing IBM's increasing success in growth markets. He is the founding architect for Easy Tier, the next generation of storage virtualization that accounts for IBM's leadership in storage efficiency and workload optimization. Vincent is defining the next generation of storage platforms, designed to deliver data on demand. Intelligent storage and workload optimized solutions will be critical to IBM's growth in newly designed data centers.

Jeffrey Jonas
IBM Software Group - Las Vegas, Nev.
Jeffrey Jonas was founder and chief scientist of Systems Research and Development, a company that IBM acquired in 2005. He now applies his expertise and passion in differentiating IBM in analytics and big data as part of Smarter Planet. Jonas is internationally recognized as a leader in his field and advises both private and public sector organizations. He is currently leading an effort to deliver real-time "sensemaking" analytics to the market. This technology is designed to analyze transactions in real time, affording clients more time to make decisions and react to changing situations more rapidly. This new breed of "context aware computing" holds big promise for organizations across a variety of industries as well as government.

Ruchir Puri
IBM Research - Yorktown Heights, NY
Dr. Ruchir Puri has led the fundamental transformation of microprocessor design in IBM's high-performance enterprise systems. Throughout his career, he has shown a passion for pushing the boundaries of design automation to reduce dependence on labor-intensive manual design. The resulting increase in design efficiency has strengthened IBM's competitive position in the marketplace. Dr. Puri led this new design approach and directed combined global teams from IBM Research and Systems and Technology Group to execute the transformation.

Balaram Sinharoy
Systems and Technology Group - Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Dr. Balaram Sinharoy is well-known as one of the world's top processor architects. Among the technologies he has pioneered are Simultaneous Multi-Threading and power-efficient, high-performance, multi-core server design. Dr. Sinharoy is currently chief architect of IBM's next generation POWER technology, responsible for micro-architecture and differentiation features. Before that, he was chief architect of IBM's POWER7 processor and was responsible for defining the POWER7 micro-architecture that delivers IBM significant leadership in the marketplace.

History of IBM Fellow Distinction

IBM Fellow is the company's pre-eminent technical distinction, granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership in engineering, programming, services, science and technology. To enhance their potential for more innovations, IBM Fellows are given additional responsibilities in their areas of specialization. Only 238 individuals have earned this designation in IBM's history, and, including today's newly named Fellows, 77 are active employees. This year's group of Fellows has 131 years of combined IBM experience and has collectively been issued 273 patents.

Examples of technology originated by IBM Fellows include:

• Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC)—the architectural basis for most high performance work stations and servers
• Thin-film heads—for high-density disk storage devices
• Relational database—one of the foundational technologies of knowledge management
• Virtual memory—which allows many users to share a single computer
• The Scanning Tunneling Microscope—the first instrument able to image atoms and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.
• Fortran—one of the world's most widely used computer languages
• RAMAC—the world's first disk drive
• Watson— the high-performance computing system that defeated two all-time winning contestants on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!

More information on IBM Fellows can be found at http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/awards/phd_fellowship_awards/index.shtml