Mr. Juan R. Rodriguez

Born in Santiago Cuba, his family moved to the United States in November of 1953 where his father became a translator in the U.N. He attended Bayside High School in Queens, New York City. He received a Bachelor?s degree in Electrical Engineering from the City College of New York and a Master?s degree in Electrical Engineering from New York University. He has pioneered the development of advanced computer data storage technologies across four decades. After starting his career at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY as a tape drive engineer, in 1966 IBM moved the tape division to Boulder, Colorado and he agreed to move with the division. He had just been promoted from Junior Engineer to Associate Engineer. Three years later in 1969, he co-founded Storage Technology Corporation along with three other IBM engineers: Jesse Awieda, Thomas S. Kavanagh, and Zoltan Herger. The company officially became known as StorageTek in 1983. At StorageTek, he served as Vice President of Engineering, Vice President and General Manager of Hard Disk Operations, and VP and GM of Optical Disk Operations. In 1985, he left StorageTek to co-found Exabyte, where he held the positions of Chairman, President and CEO. In 1996, he co-founded Ecrix Corporation, serving as its Chairman and CEO. Ecrix merged with Exabyte in 2001. He has also served on the Boards of Maxtor, Vixel and Iomega. He is currently on the Board of HiveLive, an Internet start-up and he is a connectivity partner at Appian Ventures. From 1992 through 2003, he was a professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and was instrumental in establishing and became the Co-executive Director of the Deming Center. He is now a Professor Adjunct. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1990. He was awarded The CCNY Engineering School Alumni Group's Career Achievement Award in 2002 and the prestigious Townsend Harris Medal in 2003.