In 1966, Laurel Kaleda was among the first six graduates from the Computer Science program at Washington University in St. Louis. Joining IBM, her rich career spanned the roles of customer support, SQA, patent engineering, systems development/architecture, and standards development, and she experienced both people management and individual contributor roles. As a Senior Marketing Manager in IBM’s storage system division, Laurel was an integral member of the team that managed the division’s product portfolio and strategy, and she implemented the process for market-driven product development that is still in use at IBM today. While at IBM, she received the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award in recognition of support for Storage Systems within Highly Parallel Computing Systems environments (z-Series mainframes).
Laurel held leadership positions in the IEEE Computer Society from 1987-1998 and was the IEEE Computer Society president in 1994. Laurel also served IEEE extensively as an Executive Committee Member, and Division VIII Delegate Director, 1997-1998. She was actively involved in the initial setting of standards for SQA. In addition to her BS degree in Applied Match & Computer Science, Laurel also earned an MBA in Management from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, California.
