Sharon Nunes

As an evangelist for green initiatives at IBM, Sharon Nunes showed that doing good for the environment was good business. As a mentor, she helped women shape careers in technology and promoted workplace diversity. She modeled responsible leadership through her advocacy and drove commercial growth as IBM charted a planet-conscious course for the 21st century.

In the 2000s, IBM tapped into its long-standing ethos of social responsibility to forge new commercial strategies for a cleaner and “smarter” world. CEO Sam Palmisano’s 2006 InnovationJam, a company-wide online brainstorming convention, yielded a winning idea in the company’s Big Green Innovations initiative to use technology to address emerging environmental issues. In 2008, the Smarter Planet campaign introduced a way for society to harness technology to be more productive and less wasteful.

With her background in materials and engineering, and a knowledge of IT, Nunes was ideally suited to lead these initiatives and had a profound impact on their rollout and evolution.

Nunes graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1983 with a PhD in materials science and engineering. She joined IBM as a polymers expert and spent her first two years in the company’s Rochester, Minnesota, electronics packaging lab doing materials selection for semiconductor casings. She transitioned to thin film materials, also concerned with semiconductor packaging, in 1986. By 1990 she was managing the Thin Film Structures group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights.

She held numerous executive leadership positions and launched several growth initiatives. In 1997, Nunes started the Computational Biology Center. She was one of five executives responsible for starting IBM’s Life Sciences business unit and helping to grow it in three years to more than USD 1 billion in revenue.

In 2001, she led the Life Sciences software development team, creating applications for managing data and IT in the segment. In 2004, she embarked on a year-long special assignment in corporate headquarters as vice president of technology, working with leadership to set the company’s technology agenda.

When IBM tacks a new strategic course, the company tends to think big — and its environmental push is no exception. Nunes described a world in which clean water and energy would be available to all by 2050, made possible by advances in technology and science. Big Green innovations initially focused on assessment and prediction of water availability and water quality, including usage for municipalities and industrial companies, but its mandate transcended water. “Opportunities and challenges related to climate change, environmental sustainability and social responsibility are increasingly prominent, and both business and society as a whole must mobilize to address them,” Nunes said at the time.

At an IBM-University of Southern California joint event in 2008, she spoke of a future when solar cells would generate the planet’s energy, algae would become fuel, and microorganisms would make polluted water drinkable.

Working with business units around the world, Big Green Innovations would press the case for these kinds of technology-enabled sustainability projects, always with an eye toward commercial viability. The company’s utilities business, for one, launched an intelligent network solution to improve the efficiency of energy grids. The city of Stockholm also enlisted IBM’s services to introduce congestion pricing as a means of alleviating traffic in the city’s crowded downtown. Highlighting the Stockholm project in a 2007 New York Times article, columnist Thomas Friedman echoed the strategic rationale for Big Green Innovations. “You can’t make a greener product … without making it smarter — smarter materials, smarter software or smarter design.”

The initiative also notched a number of successes in Nunes’s vocational sweet spot, water management. Among them was SmartBay, a collaboration with the Marine Institute Ireland to build a real-time information system to monitor conditions in Galway Bay. Later, Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency would team up with IBM for smarter water management across more than 130 of its beaches and lakes. The technology would help with decisions about everything from water quality to where to take vacations, Nunes said.

Nunes’s passion for the environment also led to a collaboration between IBM Research and the Beacon Institute, where IBM developed methods to monitor water conditions in the Hudson River.

That project then led to the creation of The Jefferson Project in 2014, combining the talents of IBM, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Lake George Association to create “the world’s smartest lake.” Located in a very popular area for tourism in upstate New York, as well as in a watershed that includes heavily trafficked highways, Lake George proved an ideal spot to study the impact of human activity on fresh water, and how to mitigate the effects of that activity. IBM developed and deployed a unique coupled system to both monitor the lake and predict its conditions with unprecedented fidelity. This enables changes to the lake’s water quality to be tracked in real time, offering insights into how those changes might be related to climate change, land use in the watershed, invasive species and salt runoff from nearby roadways.

“If we didn’t have those initial projects dedicated to water quality—Ireland and the Hudson, and the capabilities for localized weather forecasts with Deep Thunder—we wouldn’t have had the foundations to create The Jefferson Project,” said Lloyd Treinish, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist for Climate and Weather. That legacy led to this project having its 10th anniversary this year, and its extension to other watersheds, including Chautauqua Lake in western New York State.

“Because of the activity that Sharon led, we were able to take the nascent work we had started in weather forecasting and continue to incubate that,” Treinish said. “For example, my team at IBM worked with Con Edison, New York City’s energy provider, to begin predicting outages from storms. We were the first people to do that. We could predict outages by substation area and estimate the resources that would be needed to fix outages quickly. Utilities want to keep their costs down and reliability up, so that information is very valuable to them, and IBM has continued to refine those tools and make them available to our clients.

“Sharon is an environmentalist at heart,” Treinish added. “She’s a material scientist and chemist by training, but environmental topics were always important to her.”

Nunes considers her greatest accomplishment to be her work mentoring women in technology. “One of the reasons I spend a lot of time mentoring people and coaching people about careers in science and technology is because I consider myself an accidental engineer,” Nunes said. “If it weren’t for those people who saw something in me and saw potential in me, I’m not sure I would have ended up here today.”

In 2004, IBM awarded her the Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring. In 2006, she received the National Association of Female Executives Women of Excellence national award for her mentoring work. The next year, she launched IBM’s Technical Women’s Leadership Forum. In 2009 she was designated a Women’s History Month Honoree as one of the “Women Taking the Lead to Save our Planet.” She was co-chair of IBM’s Women in Technology committee and also a leader in IBM’s Global Women’s Council. “She has been a powerful, influential person at IBM, and she’s been a role model to many women outside of IBM,” said one protégé, Barbara Clark.

Nunes was a National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering’s “Engineer of 2020” advisory board. The University of Connecticut inducted her into its Academy of Distinguished Engineers.

Nunes retired from IBM in 2012.