Ndu Emuchay, an IBM Fellow working in Cloud Transformation Engineering, joined IBM 23 years ago as part of the DBMX Ltd. Acquisition and was named the third Black IBM Fellow in company history last April.

“[Being named a Fellow] was elating, and it was exhilarating,” he said. “But it was also a feeling of more work to be done. It’s humbling to be in the company of the giants who are IBM Fellows, so you want to live up to that status and promise of the platform you have.”

One way he’s been able to do that was in championing the Emb(race) Call for Code Spot Challenge and Call for Code for Racial Justice last year, in 2020. Ndu and his team welcomed the internal and external coding challenges as opportunities to build open-source solutions that foster racial justice, equity and equality, with empathy and sustained action.

“It was something that allowed us to go from despair to hope,” he said. “We put out solution building blocks to sustain impact over time and to shape the way that we bend the arc of justice toward racial justice and social justice. Being able to solve meaningful problems like that is what makes technology so exciting.”