IBM (NYSE: IBM) has elevated eight employees to the title of IBM Fellow -- its most prestigious technical honor -- acknowledging their important contributions, industry-leading innovations and collaboration with clients and business partners worldwide.

"IBM Fellows have invented some of the industry's most useful and profitably applied technologies -- much of the computer technology we use today," said Samuel J. Palmisano , IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. "Our 2009 Fellows were handpicked out of thousands to join this elite and distinguished group of IBM's finest innovators. Thanks to their talent, initiative and sheer passion, I know that IBM's heritage as an innovation company -- the innovation company -- is in good hands."

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

Chieko Asakawa , Ph.D.
Research, Tokyo, Japan

Chieko Asakawa's crucial contributions in the area of accessibility technology have enabled IBM to become a worldwide leader in the field. As a blind researcher, she has helped to establish awareness, both within and outside IBM, while leading the creation of technologies that have changed the way disabled individuals communicate and interact. Her early digital Braille work in the 1980s is still helping the blind community in Japan, and her work on IBM Home Page Reader opened up the Web for non-visual access. She has supported accessibility-related open standards and open community development with the Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF) project within Eclipse and is leading the Social Accessibility Collaboration service, which seeks to improve the accessibility of the Web through the power of the open community. Chieko is actively working to help women engineers pursue technical careers within and outside of IBM, and she serves with distinction on various committees as a senior accessibility researcher.

Laura Haas , Ph.D.
Research, San Jose, California

Laura Haas has been a key force in the transformation of information management inside and outside of IBM -- shifting its core from basic relational database management systems to the development of rich infrastructure for all types of information, both structured and unstructured. As an innovator and leader she set the technological foundations for three generations of research projects -- not only producing innovative technologies and assets, but also shaping research strategies and influencing product development across the company and the industry.

Mike Kaczmarski
Software Group, Tucson, Arizona

Mike Kaczmarski has been appointed IBM Fellow for the significant impact he has had in Tivoli and IBM as a whole -- particularly in the development of innovative software storage products, integration of the Tivoli portfolio and collaboration across organizational boundaries. He is the lead architect and principal author of the component integration strategy that serves as the blueprint for integrating Tivoli products within service and systems management. He is an acknowledged IBM expert in storage management as one of the original creators of the Tivoli Storage Manager product family, and also led the redesign of the TotalStorage Productivity Center.

Hung Q. Le
Systems and Technology Group, Austin, Texas

Hung Q. Le has been appointed IBM Fellow for his leadership and innovations in Microprocessor Core design. Hung has long been recognized across POWER and System z as an innovator and execution leader. Hung's innovations include numerous performance enhancements such as Out of Order and Super Scaler execution, Simultaneous Multi-Threading and ultrahigh frequency design. These innovations are not only cornerstones to IBM's microprocessor cores but to the entire microprocessor design industry. Hung's innovation in core design culminated in an unprecedented set of number one benchmarks with the introduction of the POWER6 microprocessor. Hung has been a leader in microprocessor execution since POWER3. Hung currently is leading the development of IBM's next generation POWER Processor.

Roger R. Schmidt , Ph.D.
Systems and Technology Group, Poughkeepsie, New York

Roger Schmidt is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of electronic cooling and data center thermal management, with more than 100 patents (granted or pending) in those areas. He has made sustained contributions in cooling IBM's supercomputers, high performance servers, client/servers, parallel processors and test equipment through the innovative use of air, water and refrigerants. Under his guidance, a consortium of leaders in data center thermal management was formed. He was inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2005. In recognition of his accomplishments and leadership, IBM is appointing Roger as IBM's Chief Engineer for Data Center Energy Efficiency.

Martin-J. Sepulveda , M.D., FACP
Corporate, Armonk, New York

Martin-J. Sepulveda is the first IBM Fellow chosen for a distinguished history of contributions in the area of population and occupational health. His work in understanding and controlling workplace exposures and in advancing employee health and productivity has been instrumental in leading enterprises to view the health of people and work environments as assets that are directly linked to improved performance, workplace climate and global citizenship. Dr. Sepulveda helped to pioneer integrated approaches to health promotion and preventive services at work, developed widely-adopted models for integrating workplace disability and rehabilitation management and led early efforts in health insurance design to enhance quality and coordination of care for persons with chronic diseases. He is widely recognized for his work in promoting comprehensive primary care in health systems delivery, and as an innovator in these areas has advanced national priorities for healthcare delivery reform, healthier people and healthier workplaces.

Satya P. Sharma
Systems and Technology Group, Austin, Texas

Satya Sharma is a world-renowned technical expert in AIX and Power Systems. He has served as chief AIX architect, with innovations in virtualization and Virtual I/O servers; as leader of the IBM-wide Power stack integration efforts between the Software Group and Services teams; and as leader and chief evangelist for the AIX Technical Collaboration Center. Satya has also served as Power Systems Chief Technology Officer, leading in the creation of the POWER7 architecture.

Tim J. Vincent
Software Group, Toronto, Canada

Tim Vincent has been named IBM Fellow for his continued strategic and technical DB2 leadership across the Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. As chief architect for DB2, Tim is responsible for setting the direction of the technology and for delivering it to market. Under Tim's direction, DB2 has garnered increased industry recognition for leading-edge technologies such as pureXML while also achieving widespread acceptance among clients who rely on DB2 for mission-critical applications.

About IBM Fellows
The title of IBM Fellow is the company's most preeminent technical distinction and is granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership in engineering, programming, services, science and technology. To further enhance their potential for innovative achievements, IBM Fellows are given additional responsibilities in their areas of specialization. Only 218 individuals have earned this designation in the company's history and, including the newly named Fellows, 75 are active employees.  

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
• DRAM -- the fundamental solid-state memory technology used in the industry
• Relational databases -- one of the foundational technologies of knowledge management
• The Trackpoint -- the little red pointing device for laptop computers
• Virtual memory -- allows many users to share a single computer
• The Scanning Tunneling Microscope -- the first instrument able to image atoms
• Fortran -- one of the world's most widely used computer languages
• RAMAC -- the world's first disk drive
• The AT bus -- the basic architecture for IBM personal computers