Peter A. Franaszek

Known for his research in fragmentation-reduction algorithms, network theory, and magnetic recording, Franaszek has been a researcher at the IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Dr. Franaszek received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1966. From 1965 to 1968, he was employed by Bell Laboratories; he joined the IBM Research Division in 1968, where he held a variety of research and management positions. During the academic year 1973–1974, Franaszek was on sabbatical leave at Stanford University as Consulting Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

His interests have been in the general area of information representation and management, and computer system organization. Dr. Franaszek received two IBM Corporate Awards for his work on codes for magnetic recording, an IBM Corporate Patent Portfolio Award for his contribution to the ESCON* architecture, and IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards for fragmentation-reduction algorithms, for network theory, for concurrency-control algorithms, for run-length-limited codes, for the 8B/10B code used in ESCON, Fibre Channel, and Gigabit Ethernet, and for compressed-memory machines.

Franaszek has been a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Master Inventor. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and received the 1989 IEEE Emmanuel R. Piore Award for his contributions to the theory and practice of constrained channel coding in digital recording. In 2003, he received the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his contributions to the theory and practice of such coding.

Dr. Franaszek has held more than fifty patents and published more than forty-five technical papers.