Hewlett-Packard Executive To Deliver Next Sheffield Lecture

Joel S. Birnbaum, senior vice president of research and development at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, will present the next Sheffield Fellowship address at Yale University. Titled “After the Internet,” his talk will be presented Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 4:30 p.m. in Sudler Auditorium of William Harkness Hall, 100 Wall St. Free and open to the public, the talk will be followed by a reception at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Birnbaum became director in 1991 of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s central research branch in Palo Alto, California. As a member of the corporate management staff, he serves as the company’s chief technical officer with responsibility for the coordination of worldwide activities in research and development.

Birnbaum joined HP in November 1980 as founding director of the Computer Research Center of HP Laboratories Prior to that, he spent 15 years at IBM Corp.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he last served as director of computer sciences. He was appointed vice president and director of HP Laboratories in 1984, and led the Information Technology Group from 1986-1988, supervising the development of PA-RISC hardware and software technology. From 1988 until 1991, he led the Information Architecture Group.

Throughout his career, he has been involved in the management of diverse activities in measurement, computing and communication technologies. His personal contributions are in the areas of distributed computer system architecture, real-time data acquisition, analysis and control, and RISC processor architecture. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1960, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in nuclear physics from Yale University in 1961 and 1965.

He has been elected to fellowship in the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Inc., the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the California Council on Science and Technology. He is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery. His board memberships include the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Technion University of Israel, the Tech Museum of Innovation, the Euphrat Museum of Art, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He also serves on advisory councils at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University.

The Sheffield Fellowship was established in 1996 to honor the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. Founded in 1852 to train engineers, the school produced some of the greatest inventors and industrial leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries before it was absorbed into the growing Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the mid-1940s.

The Sheffield Fellowship brings to Yale leaders and innovators in business, industry and government. In addition to presenting a lecture, fellows tour laboratories and classrooms and meet with faculty and students. Informal discussions with members of student organizations provide career perspectives in engineering and related fields, according to D. Allan Bromley, Dean of Engineering and sponsor of the fellowship program.