Selected as a Marquis Who’s Who Industry Leader in 2023 and with over 30 years of professional experience in computer science, systems engineering and technology, Joefon Jann is a recognized figure in her areas of expertise. She is a computer scientist and a distinguished engineer at the famous IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Notably, she achieved the highest technical rank upon being appointed as a distinguished engineer in 2007. Earlier in her career, she served IBM in a variety of positions, including being a technical member of the Mathematical Analysis & Computation Center, a systems engineer specialist at the New York Banking Branch Office, and a systems programmer and an APL programmer at the IBM ISTG headquarters. Prior, Ms. Jann was a technical member of the Network Analysis Corporation and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Lehman College.
Impressively, Ms. Jann holds roughly 40 patents in her field and has been cited extensively in scientific literature, in addition to authoring the preface to a book on AIX Performance. She was also the main systems person of the IBM Deep Blue Computer, the first computer that won over the human World Chess Champion of the time, Gary Kasparov, in the famous 1997 Chess Match. Among her myriad of achievements, Ms. Jann also contributed to IBM’s Unix OS (AIX) and HPC (High Performance Computing) with POWER systems. Her contributions to the technology were key enablers of the POWER Platform being the most reliable, available, secure and performant compared to other Server Platforms in the marketplace. Furthermore, she was the main inventor of DLPAR (Dynamic Logical PARtitioning), a leading-edge virtualization technology widely used by IBM clients now and for the past two decades and featured in the Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. She was the main author of the “Jann Model” for modeling Massively Parallel Workloads.
Ms. Jann received a Bachelor of Arts, with honors, in mathematics, minoring in physics, under the Wellesley College-Massachusetts Institute of Technology cross-registration program. She then earned a Master of Arts in mathematics from the City University of New York, followed by a Master of Science in computer science from Columbia University. She also earned a Micro-MBA degree from IBM.
In addition to her many technical awards, Ms. Jann is particularly proud of co-founding a group at IBM to help technical women and East Asian technologists and scientists advance further in their respective fields. She is a life senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. She was published as a Lifetime Achiever with Marquis Who’s Who in 2017; was highlighted on the cover and inside the fifth edition of Millennium, a Marquis Who’s Who Magazine in 2020; received The Marquis Star Treatment with Star Jones in 2021; was featured among Who’s Who of Professional Women in 2022; and is now a Marquis Who’s Industry Leader in 2023.