Dr Stephen K. Boyer has over 27 years of experience in numerous capacities in corporate environments. Most recently, Dr Boyer has been working with IBM Life Sciences (LS) team in the area of knowledge management. Prior to this, Dr Boyer spent 14 years at IBM's Research Division and is credited with being the "father" of the IBM Patent Server (http://www.patents.ibm.com). This effort (1994-2000) to attempt to aggregate the entire intellectual property of the world into a single database and to make it available on the internet has resulted in one of the largest and most successful internet sites on the web. This accomplishment has been acknowledged worldwide as a pivotal event which impacted the entire world of intellectual property. Dr Boyer served as an advisor to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) on its WIPO-Net initiative and as a lecturer to the WIPO international academy on technical issues and opportunities for improving international access to intellectual property. The IBM Patent Server (Intellectually Property Network) was so successful that IBM spun it off as an independent business venture known as Delphion (http://www.delphion.com), which was recently acquired by Thomson Publishing. He then went on to help launch First to file (2000-02) a company focused on allowing people to file and manage intellectual property assets electronically.
Dr Boyer was a primary catalyst in IBM's Digital Library initiative. He initiated collaboration between IBM and Thomson Publishing which resulted in a successful venture to make scientific and technical journals available via the internet, currently marketed as the Web of Science by Thomson ISI Corp. Dr Boyer has worked in numerous capacities (technical and management) for IBM including four years on overseas assignments to direct scientific and technical computing initiatives in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He served as IBM's representative to evaluate investments with software start-ups in the area of scientific and technical computing. Dr Boyer has numerous patents applying computer technology to developing tools for building scientific databases and several pending patents on internet metacrawling and searching technologies.
Prior to working for IBM research, Dr Boyer worked for 10 years with Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss Pharmaceutical Company, now called Novartis. While at Ciba-Geigy, he worked in Europe and in the US as a Senior Research Scientist where he played a critical role in the development and commercialisation of two drugs, (a cephalosporin antibiotic Cefroxadine and an ACE inhibitor (Lotensin / Benazapril)). Dr Boyer has numerous technical publications and has lectured extensively as an invited speaker. He holds several patents related to the discovery of new synthetic methods and production of medicinal compounds currently marketed by Novartis. Prior to working at Ciba-Geigy / Novartis, he worked as a lecturer at Tufts University chemistry department. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Temple University in Philadelphia and a PhD degree in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, from Tufts University in Massachusetts.