John Maxwell Cohn

An innovator in design automation for both analog and digital custom integrated circuits, Cohn has served as Chief Scientist of Design Automation in the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, Burlington, Vermont. Born in Manhattan, New York, Cohn moved with his family to Houston, Texas when he was three. As a child, he had many role models nearby, as his parents were friends with several NASA astronauts. He recalled that, "As a young kid in Houston, TX, with that motivation, I began taking apart everything I could get my hands on to figure out how they worked. By the time I was 12 or so I could even put some of them back together again. I built my own laboratory where I experimented with every sort of science material I could get my hands on. I did experiments in chemistry, physics, biology and math."

Cohn received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at MIT, and earned a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University as part of the IBM Resident Study Program. After graduating from MIT, he moved to a converted schoolhouse in northern Vermont and created a laboratory in his house.

As IBM's Chief EDA Strategist, he leveraged his deep expertise and proven track record of innovation in the design of world-class microprocessors, system-on-a-chip solutions, and a broad array of technology enablement services. His specific role for IBM has been described as Chief Scientist for Computer Aided Design. The group he led helped create chips for everything from camcorders to video games to supercomputers. Cohn's accomplishments shortened development cycles, improved efficiency, and increased client satisfaction. He is broadly recognized both inside and outside IBM as the company's premier technical leader in electronic design automation (EDA) technology, and has been a strong driving force behind IBM's continuous innovation in the methodologies used in integrated circuit design.

In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in recognition of his contributions to high performance custom circuit design automation. In 2006, Cohn was named IBM Fellow — the company's most prestigious technical honor. He has authored more than 30 technical papers and contributed to four books on design automation. He has held 60 patents issued or pending in the field of design automation, methodology, and circuits.

He has been active in education issues at a local, state, and national level. Cohn has served as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Vermont and has taught part-time at both high school and elementary school levels. He has been active for many years in National Engineering Week, co-chaired IBM's corporate-wide Technical Education Outreach Steering Committee, and served on the science education standards committee for the state of Vermont. He is eager to share his love of science and engineering with anyone who would listen, and has frequently taken his traveling "Jolts and Volts" electricity show to schools, community groups, universities, and museums across the US — including such diverse venues as the New York Hall of Science, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and frequent shows at Disney's Epcot Center in Florida. His education program has been covered by CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, EETimes, USA Today, and other newspapers across the US.

In 2009, Cohn appeared on the Discovery Channel show The Colony, a simulated life-after-a-global-catastrophe series based in downtown Los Angeles. He implemented his abundant knowledge of engineering throughout the series, including a Tesla coil, soap, spark-gap transmitter, solar tracking device, wood gasifier, electric vehicle, flamethrower, and many other useful devices. In October 2013, he was a presenter at TEDxDelft 2013, themed "Do try this at home," and his talk was titled "The Importance of Play." Cohn lives in the restored schoolhouse in Jonesville, Vermont with his family.