Joel S. Birnbaum

Joel Samuel Birnbaum, born on 20 December 1937, is a technology executive who rose to senior vice president at Hewlett-Packard. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics at Cornell University and a doctorate in nuclear physics at Yale University in 1966. He worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1965 to 1980, becoming director of computer sciences there, and then joined Hewlett-Packard in 1980 to direct the Computer Research Center of HP Labs. He became vice president and director of HP Labs in 1984 and senior vice president in 1991. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 for contributions to advanced computer architectures, received the IEEE Ernst Weber Engineering Leadership Recognition Award in 2000, and is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE and the Royal Academy of Engineering.