President Martha E. Pollack has been elected to serve on the IBM board of directors, the company announced Dec. 11.

IBM’s board is a 13-member group of global thought and business leaders from a wide range of fields and backgrounds; it includes the company’s president and CEO, Virginia Rometty, as chair.

Pollack will not be the only leader of a higher education institution on the board: Shirley Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, also is a member.

Rometty said she is excited to add Pollack’s skills and expertise as a “renowned AI researcher and technologist” to the IBM board. “Her perspective on education and the use of technology to improve lives will be great assets to IBM and to our shareholders,” she said in a release.

Pollack said her appointment to the IBM board will serve more than one purpose. “It is important both for universities to have an awareness of the corporate world, where many of our students go on to work, and for those in the corporate world to have a better sense of what happens in universities,” she said.

Pollack noted that IBM, a global information technology corporation based in Armonk, New York, has a deep commitment to diversity and has been in business for more than a century. Its roots were firmly established in New York state’s Southern Tier when the company was founded in 1911 in Endicott.

Her appointment is effective Feb. 1, 2019.