Susana Rodriguez de Tembleque

Susana Rodriguez de Tembleque became the VP of Design for IBM Research in 2019. Since joining, Susana has built an organization dedicated to creating an excellent, differentiated, end to end experience for IBM Research. The Design org in Research spans client experience, product incubation, content platform, technology experiences, physical experiences, and brand/visual design, allowing the team to weave a connected and deliberate experience.

Prior to this role, Susana served as VP and Executive Brand Director for IBM Watson. She was responsible for advancing and managing how the IBM Watson brand is brought to life, ensuring that we build the right equity across all IBM Watson brand experiences spanning from marketing, communications, and product.

Before joining IBM, Susana worked as Creative Director of Retail at Apple, where she built a first-of-a-kind cross-functional discipline to design the future experience of Apple retail. Prior to that she was founder and executive creative director of Studio Partners, where she collaborated with clients to create bold brand experiences that engaged their constituents in new, meaningful ways, such as a real-time data installation for Bloomberg and the Watson Client Experience Center in Astor Place for IBM. Prior to that, she was Executive Creative Director at SYPartners, where she led award-winning brand experiences for clients including IBM, Apple, Under Armour, Target, Jawbone and Starbucks.

Susana is originally from Madrid, Spain, and is based in San Francisco. She is the mother of four children, aged 16 to 23.