Biography | Arvind Krishna — The Saarinen Crescent Where He Entered IBM Research

People treat an IBM career as a climb that begins in sales or consulting.

His began in 1990 inside this research laboratory.

The Thomas J. Watson Research Center on Kitchawan Road in Yorktown Heights is the headquarters of IBM Research.

Eero Saarinen designed the crescent-shaped main building, finished in 1961, as a long glass arc on a ridge above the Taconic.

IBM's own history page and Krishna's official biography both place his first IBM job here, while the Illinois doctorate was still unfinished.

He stayed inside the research organization for years after.

In January 2015 he became director of IBM Research, the eleventh person to hold that title in the division's history.

The official Illinois alumni citation from that period put about 3,000 scientists and technologists under the office, across a dozen labs.

The building is a working campus on private land, not a museum.

A visitor can see the glass arc from the approach on Route 134; the labs behind it are not a walk-up tour.

What happened here is the start of a thirty-year internal line that later included security software, systems, cloud, and the research director's chair.

Photo: Simon Greig, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons