IBM Research Chief to Become Distinguished Scientist in Residence at NYU

Paul Horn, who led IBM’s research division for more than decade, will become a Distinguished Scientist in Residence at New York University in September. Horn, whose work at IBM included work on the Deep Blue and Blue Gene supercomputers, will have affiliations with a trio of NYU institutions: the Stern School of Business, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts and Science.

Horn, 60, took the helm of IBM Research in 1996, overseeing and developing the world’s largest research organization dedicated to information technology, with 3,000 researchers at eight labs worldwide. Under Horn’s leadership as senior vice-president and director, IBM Research has produced a series of technological breakthroughs, including the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue, the world’s first copper chip, and strained silicon—a discovery that allows chips to run up to 35 percent faster. In addition, Horn has also led IBM Research’s $100 million dollar effort to build the world’s first petaFLOP-scale computer—a computer 10 times more powerful than all the networked computing capability in the United States—in order to aid in the understanding of how human proteins fold.

In addition, Horn implemented a unique management system at IBM—one that views the need to conduct exploratory research and the delivery of marketplace-ready technology as necessarily linked. As a result, IBM Research is now structured to speed the flow of innovation through IBM’s product groups to the market while pursuing research areas likely to yield groundbreaking technologies in a number of key areas including semiconductors, data management, servers, and middleware.

Horn graduated from Clarkson College of Technology in 1968 and received his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Rochester in 1973. Prior to joining IBM in 1979, Horn was a professor of physics in the James Franck Institute and the physics department at the University of Chicago. Horn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1974 to 1978. He is a former associate editor of Physical Review Letters and has published over 85 scientific and technical papers. In 2002, Horn was named as one of America’s top technical leaders by Scientific American magazine.