Kate Blair

Dr. Kate Blair is the Director of Incubation and Technology Experiences for IBM Research where she drives adoption of disruptive technologies through lean, user-centered design and development. Her group's mission is to discover the usability, feasibility and desirability of emerging technologies. She partners with experts within the Research division with deep domain expertise and transforms disruptive technology into solutions that engage and delight.

Most recently, Dr. Blair served as a Director of Product for watsonx, building generative AI tooling for developers. Before that, she served as the Digital Platform lead for IBM Research, leading cross-functional teams to relaunch the division's digital presence (including this very page), develop engaging and immersive experiences for emerging technologies, and incubating the generative AI interfaces that were launched into watsonx.ai.

In previous professional lives, Dr. Blair trained early career product managers, modernized project management software, ran data-driven field ops for an underdog congressional campaign, built software for bioinformaticians, and explored the molecular underpinnings of cellular pluripotency. She earned her undergraduate in Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology from Yale University and her doctorate in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Dr Blair's work is fueled by her fascination with people, technology, and hard problems and by good, strong tea.