The Engineer Who Started With Language
Tara Astigarraga is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who was born and raised in Arizona. At the University of Arizona she double-majored in communication and Spanish linguistics, planning a career as a bilingual teacher or social worker. An internship at IBM's Tucson site during her senior year changed her direction, and IBM hired her full-time after graduation.
Much of her work involves enterprise storage — the systems that hold data for banks, hospitals, and governments. Her first patent, granted in 2008, was for end-of-life prediction for flash memory. Flash memory, used in phones, USB drives, and solid-state drives, stores data in tiny cells. Each cell can only be erased and rewritten a limited number of times, called program/erase cycles, before it becomes unreliable. If a system can predict when that limit is near, it can move data to safety before anything is lost.
Engineers also use wear leveling, which spreads writes across many cells so no single cell wears out early — like rotating the tires on a car.
Astigarraga has since earned more than 70 patents in storage, networking, security, and blockchain. IBM named her a Master Inventor and a Distinguished Engineer. She has served as vice president of the Tucson Native American Diversity Network and builds mentoring connections for Native American students and employees.
