John Mullaly is a creative technologist, passionate about art, science, and humanism

John has worked on emerging technologies at IBM for over thirty years, starting with computer graphics in 1987. He’s an IBM master inventor, with over forty patents related to human-computer interaction. In 2015 he received the IBM chairman’s corporate patent award for his work in three dimensional interactive environments.

He graduated from NY Institute of Technology in 1992 with a bachelors of science in general studies, in which he combined art, math and computer science. In 1998 he completed an executive masters program at UT Austin with masters of science in technology commercialization.

At IBM, John grew from designing graphics to designing software, to designing and building new businesses. His first job was making charts for some of IBM’s senior most executives and technical leaders. In one particularly memorable chart, he illustrated IBM’s twenty year technology outlook. That view of technologies yet to come has inspired him ever since.

He led a number of first releases and startup businesses, such as IBM’s first cloud computing big data analytics service. As a senior advisor for IBM corporate development, he interfaced with startups and venture capital firms, and advised IBM’s leadership on over forty company acquisitions. He now works with IBM’s largest acquisition, Red Hat, and he will leave IBM in it’s largest divestiture, in the spinout of the services business Kyndryl.

As an artist, John does painting, sculpture and creative writing. Projects include monumental sculptures on the works of Shakespeare, and Wagner’s ring cycle operas. He co-authored a book on object-oriented software design, and wrote a libretto for opera, based on Heian era Japanese poetry.

As a lifelong student, over the past several years he has taken up a deep interest in studying theoretical physics, and recently started publishing a blog entitled Notes on Constructal Mechanics.