Dr. Jeff Welser, Vice President of IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, California oversees scientists and engineers performing exploratory and applied research at the home of the relational database and world’s first hard disk drive. Today the lab specializes in areas including: Watson technologies, storage systems, data management and analytics, nanotechnology, materials science, Web 2.0 technologies and IBM Smarter Planet projects, such as healthcare informatics, water desalination and electric car batteries. In his prior position, Dr. Welser was the Director of Strategy and Program Development for the Accelerated Discovery Lab and simultaneously the Director of Almaden Services Research, managing a portfolio of research into improved business processes, software and technology to enable IBM's Global Business and Technology Services organizations. Dr. Welser joined IBM Research in 1995, working on novel silicon devices at the T.J. Watson Research Center, and served as adjunct professor at Columbia University, teaching semiconductor device physics at the same time. In 2000, he took an assignment in IBM’s Technology Group, and then joined IBM Microelectronics in 2001, as leader of high-performance CMOS device design.