Dr. Joan L Mitchell was born on May 24, 1947 in Pa lo Alto, CA. She obtained her B.S. in Physics at Stanford University in 1969, and her M.S. and Ph.D.degrees in physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1971 and 1974, respectively.

Dr. Mitchell joined The Exploratory Printing Technologies Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. as a Research Staff Member in 1974. Her first assignment was to “invent new ways to leave marks on paper.” Her first patentable invention was a method of ultra sonic printing. Spring of 1975, she co-invented the Resistive Ribbon Thermal Transfer printing technology which led to IBM’s Selectric Quietwriter typewriter a decade later. Summer of 1976, she switched into the field of data
compression and invented novel binary facsimile compression techniques. She wrote IBM’s proposal to the CCITT for an international Two-Dimensional facsimile data compression standard and attended meetings in Geneva and Kyoto in Dec. 78’ and Nov. 79’ respectively. In 1980, she was manager of one of several teams who created the IBM Series/1 Internal teleconferencing system, eventually installed in over 100 locations worldwide. Her fast decompression code for the CCITT fax standard migrated into many IBM products on multiple processors. The researchers also created fast grayscale compression and decompression. The team gradually migrated into fast rotation scaling up and scaling down of the binary images sometimes combined with binary compression
or decompression. In March 1987, she attended her first JPEG meeting in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1989, she transferred into ImagePlus marketing focusing on image education, and JPEG. She returned to the research center in the fall of 1991 to co-author the book on JPEG. She was co-editor of the first JPEG standard and pressured the committee to have it “good in both software, and hardware.”

In mid-1994 thru mid-1996 she took a 2 year leave of absence. She worked quarter time in IBM Burlington, Vermont helping to verify a JBIG chip (Joint Bi-level Image experts Group) and co-authored an MPEG book. In the spring of 1996, she taught at the University of Illinois in the computer science dept. as a visiting professor and worked part time in the Beckman Institute on campus.

In the fall of 1996, she returned to the IBM Research Center and soon linked
up with the IBM printing systems division in Boulder, Colorado. She
transferred there in 1999. Her skill with fast facsimile and JPEG
decompression, rotation and scaling proved crucial.in eliminating bottlenecks
in the high end printers.

Dr. Mitchell is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the American Physical Society, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, Society for Imaging Science and Technology, and an ex. IBM Fellow .She was elected to the IBM academy of Engineering and later became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She holds over 110 patents and has published over 100 (papers, etc.). In 2006 she received the, Leadership Award from the International Multimedia Telecoms Consortium, and the University of Illinois Distinguished alumni Service Award.

Dr. Mitchell, (retired) now resides in her hometown of Modesto, CA her outside interests include reading writing, swimming and mentoring friends and colleagues.