Dr. Alessandro Curioni is an IBM Fellow, Vice President of IBM Europe and Africa and Director of the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland. He is responsible for IBM corporate research in Europe and leads IBM’s global research strategies in Algorithms and Applications.

Curioni is an internationally recognized leader in the area of high-performance computing and computational science, where his innovative thinking and seminal contributions have helped solve some of the most complex scientific and technological problems in healthcare, aerospace, consumer goods and electronics. He was a member of the winning team recognized with the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in 2013 and 2015. His research interests now include AI, Big Data and novel compute paradigms, such as neuromorphic and quantum computing.

Curioni received his undergraduate degree in Theoretical Chemistry and his PhD from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. He started at IBM Research – Zurich as a PhD student in 1993 before officially joining as a research staff member in 1998, where he had several research and manager roles, including being the founding manager of the Cognitive Computing and Computational Sciences department. He is a member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.