Joan Laverne Mitchell (May 24, 1947 – December 2, 2015)[1][2] was an American computer scientist, data compression pioneer, and inventor who, as a researcher at IBM, co-invented the JPEG digital image format.

[2] Mitchell was a National Merit Scholar at Stanford University, where her work included an independent study project on Brillouin scattering in bromine.

[7] Mitchell began working at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1974, in the Exploratory Printing Technologies Group.

[3][4] In 2007 IBM sold their Printing Systems Division to Ricoh,[9] and Mitchell went with them to the resulting joint venture, InfoPrint Solutions.

[1] She was the 2011 winner of the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award,[1][10] and is listed in the Hall of Fame of distinguished alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.