Diane Pozefsky

Diane Pozefsky

Diane P. Pozefsky earned a Sc.B. Degree in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1972 and her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UNC in 1979 under the tutelage of Doctor Mehdi Jazayeri. She joined IBM Corporation, Raleigh, NC, in 1979 as a member of the Communication Systems Architecture Department working in the specification and application of the Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a large and complex feature-rich network architecture developed in the 1970s by IBM. Similar in some respects to the OSI reference model, but with a number of differences. SNA is essentially composed of seven layers. She worked for IBM for 25 years and was named an IBM Fellow in 1994 in recognition of her work on APPN and AnyNet architectures and development. She was tasked with the network and application design for the 1998 and 2000 Olympics. Her work life has largely been focused on networking and software engineering, including:

• developing networking protocols
• deploying the network at the Nagano Olympics
• development processes
• storage networking
• application development
• mobile computing

She has worked in development, design, and architecture and two areas that she has become particularly interested in later in here career are improving quality and blending theory and practice.

Pozefsky was awarded the Women in Technology International (WITI) 2011 Hall of Fame Award for contributions to the fields of Science and Technology.

Additional professional interests include:

• knowledge management
• National Engineers Week
• women in technology
• improving ties between universities and industry
• using technology to improve teleworking and remote teams

Dr. Diane Pozefsky returned to UNC after retiring from IBM in June 2004.