Sandra K. Johnson is the Founder and CEO, SKJ Visioneering, LLC, a technology consulting company. She is an Independent Director on both Regional Management Corporation’s (NYSE:RM) Board of Directors, and Pan-American Life Insurance Group’s Board. Her previous career included 26 years at IBM, including Chief Technology Officer (CTO), IBM Central, East and West Africa, and CTO, IBM Global Small and Medium Businesses. She has been a Business Development Executive with IBM Middle East and Africa (MEA), where she also founded MEA’s first patent re-view board for IBM employees.
In addition to these roles, Dr. Johnson has been the IBM Linux Performance Architect, Manager, IBM’s Linux Performance team and its WebSphere Database Development team, and a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. She has a high-performance computing background and has conducted research in several computer performance-related areas. She was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, which consisted, at the time, of the top 1% of IBM’s over 200K technical professionals. She was part of the IBM Research design team that created the prototype for Deep Blue, IBM’s world-famous chess machine. Dr. Johnson has received numerous technical and professional awards and is a Master Inventor with over 45 issued and pending patents.
She has authored and co-authored over 80 publications and is Editor-in-Chief of the book Performance Tuning for Linux Servers. In addition, she has authored Inspirational Nuggets, Inspirational Nuggets Too, and GREGORY: The Life of a Lupus Warrior. She has written her memoir, Soft Power for the Journey: The Life of a STEM Trailblazer.
She was awarded a certificate of completion for the Power, Innovation and Leadership Program, April 2023, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Executive Education. She has received a Rice University Laureates Award as a Distinguished Alumni. Dr. Johnson earned B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Southern University and Stanford University, respectively, and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University. As a result, she became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer engineering. She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an IEEE Fellow, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), an ACM Distinguished Engineer.