Jerome Swartz

Dr. Jerome Swartz is the Chairman of Zortag’s Advisory Board. He co-founded Symbol Technologies, Inc. (now a part of Motorola), and served as its Chairman and Chief Scientist until his retirement in June, 2004. Symbol employed more than 6000 people worldwide with operations in more than 90 countries and revenues in excess of $1.6 billon. In 1999, Swartz led symbol to win the National Medal of Technology, the U.S’s highest honor for technology innovation. The award was presented to Dr. Swartz by President Clinton at the White House on March 14, 2000.

Dr. Swartz received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Brooklyn’s Polytechnic University, where he was the recipient of National Science Foundation and Ford Fellowships. He was the 1990 recipient of Polytechnic University’s Alumni of the Year Award. Dr. Swartz represented high tech companies at the 1986 conference co-sponsored by the White House and the Department of Education to stimulate minority opportunities in technology. He is a board member at Stony Brook University and at Polytechnic University, and a Trustee at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and at the University of California at San Diego.

Dr. Swartz received the 1990 Tech Island Award from IEEE for “Turning Ideas Into Reality,” and was the 1995 IEEE Wheeler Award winner. In 1996, he was named an IEEE Fellow, the organization’s highest technology honor. In 1998, Dr. Swartz received the IEEE’s prestigious Ernst Weber Leadership Award for Career Achievement, and in 2000 he was honored with the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for outstanding technical achievement. Also in 2000, Dr. Swartz was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for “Distinguished Contributions to Engineering.” In 2001, he was awarded the first annual Eureka Award by the New York Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Swartz patented and led the development of the first hand-held barcode laser scanner, a data capture productivity tool now common in myriad applications across diverse global markets. Under his direction through the 1980’s, Symbol also patented the world’s first hand-held scanner-integrated wireless computer and the first spread spectrum wireless LAN (WiFi), enabling real-time mobile data transactions. He also led the development of the first commercially accepted wearable computer, which combines a ring scanner worn on the finger and a wireless LAN-based, wrist-mounted computer for handling intensive barcode and voice over IP applications. Dr. Swartz patented and was instrumental in the development of PDF417, the high capacity two-dimensional bar code symbology that encodes more than a kilobyte of machine-readable data in a postage stamp-sized symbol. He also patented and drove the development of the portable shopper self-checkout system, which allows customers to scan their own items in the aisles as they shop, to bypass traditional checkout lanes.