Jia Chen

Jia Chen is the global leader of Watson Experience Centers at IBM, responsible for cognitive client experiences across all Watson group. She also serves on the IBM Academy of Technology Leadership Team which is a leadership team consists of top 100 technical leaders of the company.

She was formerly the Director of Health Solutions for Smarter Cities at IBM, responsible for the definition of strategic direction and development of innovative smarter health solutions for IBM’s clients. Prior to that, she was the Director of Technical Sales & Innovation for IBM’s Growth Market Units (GMU), based in Shanghai, China. Dr. Chen had leadership for technical sales team across all IBM's business units for the Greater China Group, ASEAN, Australia/New Zealand, Korea, India, Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America, focusing on bringing innovative integrated solutions to IBM’s clients.

Before moving to GMU, she was the Program Director for Innovation at IBM Corporate Headquarters in New York. She was responsible for the identification, structuring and execution of first of a kind technology and business initiatives that provide innovative and sustainable differentiation for IBM's clients. She led IBM cross business units global teams and drove collaborative innovation in datacenter, cloud, smarter security and energy with major multi-national firms. Prior to that, she held business development, technology development and research positions at IBM Systems and Technology Group and IBM Research.

She received her B. S. from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and her Ph.D in physics from Yale University. In 2005, she was named by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 (TR35). In 2006 she was honored as Best Researcher of the Year by Small Times magazine, recognized as one of the top 15 innovators of Nano50 by NASA's Nanotech Briefs and inducted as a Fellow of the World Technology Network. Chen holds both U.S. and foreign patents. She is the author of numerous professional publications, and a frequent invited/keynote speaker at professional society conferences.