Meet Emerging Engineer Logan Bistodeau, IBM

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

When he was growing up, Logan Bistodeau was always interested in how heavy machinery worked, so it was natural that he earned a mechanical engineering degree at Iowa State University. He originally grew up near the Twin Cities in Minnesota, now works for IBM, and is in his first year of the Emerging Engineer Program through the Global Electronics Association. I got to know Logan a little better at APEX EXPO 2026.

Michelle Te: Logan, what first sparked your interest in engineering? 

Logan Bistodeau: As a child, I was always fascinated by heavy machines, like you would see at construction sites. Over time, that interest grew into other types of vehicles. 

Math and science were also always strong subjects for me, and I found satisfaction in learning subjects and completing tasks. I went to a good high school and I also took some college courses while I was in high school.

Te: How did you get into electronics?

Bistodeau: Mechanical engineering seemed like the right route for me in college because that’s what I was interested in, as well as it being a fairly broad subject for me to study. Getting into the electronics industry was definitely a bit of a change.

Te: Had you heard of a printed circuit board before? 

Bistodeau: Yes. I had done some soldering, and we studied circuits and motors in college. But other than that, I didn’t really know much. However, I knew electronics were never going away and would be the future of technology.  

Te: When you were graduating, did you have an idea of which direction you wanted to go with your degree?

Bistodeau: I was very open to a lot of different fields. Originally, I thought I wanted to do design work, like 3D modeling. I had worked as a process engineer at a contract manufacturer for printed circuit board assemblies, and that kind of showed me the world of soldering and building circuit board assemblies. It drew me down the path toward IBM.

Te: Tell me about what you do at IBM. 

Bistodeau: I am currently a printed circuit board assembly qualification engineer, and more recently, I am doing a lot of failure analysis for field failures and characterization of development parts.

For the qualification part, when we have a new product, we need a new product introduction (NPI), and we don't manufacture much ourselves anymore. A lot of that's now outsourced to contract manufacturers, and part of my job is ensuring the reliability of those products and repeatability of the suppliers’ processes.

Now that we're doing just the design portion, I'll be in charge of running qualification builds at the contract manufacturer and forcing reworks of some of those samples. They're building it, but I'll pick which components to be reworked and when, and require all the profiles for the ovens and rework processes.

There’s also strain-gauge analysis of the mechanical processes. Once I get the samples in my lab in Rochester, I’ll be doing the reliability testing. It’s mainly accelerated thermal cycling to really stress those solder joints from a coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) standpoint.

Once we're through 1500 cycles of ATC, a destructive analysis would typically be one cycle per hour. I would also do some X-ray inspection, dye penetrant analysis, and cross-sectioning just to ensure the joints are reliable. 

Te: Since getting involved in the industry, what's something that surprised you about it, especially coming from this mechanical background?

Bistodeau: Some surprises to me are really how far we've come in such a small amount of time. I didn't realize the extent of AI, for example. It’s been around for a while, but the last couple years it's been really advancing at an alarming rate. 

It doesn’t play much of a role in what I do, and we’re a little hesitant to allow our contract manufacturers to use AI. We've had some issues with automated optical inspection. Those machines will flag issues, and they were actually using AI to accept or reject that. We don't necessarily prohibit it, but we want to make sure we validate it. We'll go through some extended steps.

Internally, though, it’s very helpful at IBM for data organization and collection. 

Te: You’re early in your career, but what type of impact would you like to see yourself having on this industry?

Bistodeau: I definitely see myself staying in the industry for the extent of my career. I want to have some interesting or cool findings from a failure analysis, something that can impact a standard. I also want to be able to publish a paper regarding the findings.

Te: You mentioned you’re really interested in EVs. Is there another technology that excites you right now? 

Bistodeau: It would be hard for me to stray from the electronic vehicles, especially with how we've come from the original days of the slow charging and the limited range. Now it’s so fast to charge a full-range vehicle.

I do worry about the long-term effects, and there’s always the question of the mining of lithium and the disposal of lithium-ion batteries. Sustainability is important to me. I want to ensure that they are, indeed, better overall for the environment than an internal combustion engine. I’m very excited to see what kind of remedies and mitigations that the experts come up with.

Te: To wrap up, tell me about your involvement in the Emerging Engineer Program. How did you get involved, and how's that going?

Bistodeau: This is my first year as an Emerging Engineer, and the first event I’ve attended. I originally heard about it from coworkers. IBM has quite a few members who were involved inthe Emerging Engineer Program. It looked like a great opportunity to attend APEX EXPO and get some outside mentoring in addition to what I get at IBM.

Te: I agree, it's such a good opportunity to network with your peers as well as those who have been in the industry for many years.

Bistodeau: My mentor is Brian Chislea, who works at Dow. He’s been really great so far. I was actually at one of the standards meetings with him, and he brings a lot of good energy. He gets people talking.

Te: Excellent. Thank you, Logan. It was great to meet you.

Bistodeau: You’re welcome.