John Batey

SVP and President

John Batey is senior vice president and division president of Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. (QMT), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm, Inc. Batey is overseeing the commercialization of Qualcomm's mirasol™ displays. QMT is headquartered in San Diego, Calif., with a MEMS Research and Innovation Center in San Jose, Calif. and operations in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Batey joined Qualcomm with the acquisition of Iridigm Display Corporation in 2004, where he was chief operating officer with overall responsibility for the management of the company. As one of the early-stage Iridigm employees, he helped to secure venture capital funding and led the early engineering efforts before focusing on the business side of the company. Following the acquisition, Batey served as assistant general manager of QMT until 2006 when he received his current appointment.

Batey began his professional career in 1983 as a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, working on the physics of insulating films. In 1987 he accepted a position in IBM's newly-formed flat panel display development group. In this role, he led IBM's TFT (thin film transistor) process team in transferring technology from research and development into high volume production at DTI, a joint venture with Toshiba in Japan. Batey was also part of the team that developed the display for IBM's first notebook computer. During his tenure at IBM, Batey authored numerous publications, was awarded several patents and received a number of awards, including an Outstanding Innovation Award and an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.

In 1995, Batey left IBM to join Xerox Corporation and worked with the management team in the Electronics and Imaging Laboratory at Xerox PARC to spin-out an independent company, dpiX Incorporated. At dpiX Batey held several positions including vice president of operations and senior vice president of engineering, and helped lead the commercialization of large area, solid-state X-ray imaging devices from laboratory-scale demos through medical product qualification and into volume production. He left dpiX to join Iridigm in 2001.

Batey is a member of Society for Information Display and was recently appointed to the board of directors of the U.S. Display Consortium (USDC). Batey received his doctorate in applied physics from the University of Durham, United Kingdom.