2026 IBM Fellows

Christy Tyberg says never thinking much about promotions may have helped her become one of only 340 IBM Fellows appointed since 1963. “My focus was always to challenge myself, stay busy, and keep learning. I’ve just wanted to make an impact, and if you’re doing that it’ll be recognized, even if not right away.”

Christy is an expert in developing cutting-edge technologies to improve the performance and scale of both semiconductor and quantum hardware. After leading R&D efforts to qualify new materials and technologies for legacy chip production, she joined IBM’s quantum team and has been instrumental in the work to adapt semiconductor fabrication to the new materials and technologies needed by quantum processors.

As an IBM Fellow, Christy will be responsible for transforming quantum processor fabrication technology and manufacturing plans to accelerate progress toward quantum advantage in the near term, and fault-tolerant quantum systems in coming years. She will lead teams for quantum processor fabrication while partnering with theory and device teams to define technology requirements, as well as the expansion of quantum manufacturing capabilities across sites.

“We’re building hardware that’s entirely new in many respects, and while it has many technical differences from semiconductors, the biggest difference in our work is the culture of taking risks and moving fast. There’s always a new challenge and an amazing team of people working together to figure it out. Our approach is to move fast, fail fast, learn fast, and then incorporate our progress as we move forward. If we don’t fail sometimes, we’re not trying hard enough.”

“What we’ve accomplished in quantum and what’s coming is just really, really exciting. I never imagined being on a project with such potential to change the future of computing. We have a lot of competitors, but we are leading and we are developing a technology that will change the world.”

Jeff Mitchell’s approach to his work, which now includes an appointment to IBM Fellow, began in a high school classroom. “I had a math teacher who loved finding ways to tie the current lesson to art, history, science and other topics. It made me realize that learning isn’t just about distinct subjects, and you can be a lifelong learner who finds those connections. He sparked my curiosity, and so instead of just using computers I wanted to understand how they worked under the hood, as well as related technologies. That’s been really valuable in my career.”

After college and some time at larger organizations, Jeff joined HashiCorp in its start-up phase and the broad technical knowledge he’d built since high school proved ideal for leading teams in a smaller company. He became a transformational technical leader who helped shape HashiCorp’s core product portfolio for more than a decade until its IBM acquisition in 2025. Jeff’s work established a new industry standard for modern security applications, and his influence spans architecture, engineering strategy, product direction, and cross‑organizational technical integration. At IBM, his strategic technical decisions and cross‑disciplinary leadership have been pivotal to integrating and aligning the HashiCorp portfolio with IBM’s identity, security, and cloud strategies.

“Before HashiCorp, I was at an established company with globe-spanning systems largely built in-house, and who were understandably hesitant to try new things. At HashiCorp I was exposed to a startup culture that had much more agility without a legacy business to maintain – so I’ve worked in both worlds. That experience helps me understand IBM’s processes and diverse customer needs, while working to seed that startup-style agility into IBM.”

As an IBM Fellow, Jeff will focus on HashiCorp products’ technical architecture, establishing cross‑portfolio architectural standards and guiding the evolution of HashiCorp products to support AI and NHI workflows, and with core security services modernization. His expertise in zero‑trust systems and scalable infrastructure will accelerate innovation across product teams, improve company‑wide security posture, and shape IBM’s next generation of AI-driven, cloud‑native, and identity-centric technologies.

His advice for younger engineers is to always keep learning, especially as AI advances. “We’re greatly enabled by the capabilities we have now, but relying too much on AI can do a disservice to understanding what you’re building. Spending time comprehending the underpinnings will make you more valuable later – as someone who can not only sling code, but debug and optimize that code and understand how it interacts with the many disparate systems you’ll need to integrate with. Building that muscle will help you dive into and be more productive on each next project.”