Current Boards
● Chair, Board of Advisors, Tickle College of Engineering, University of Tennessee
● Member, Advisory Board, Buzzy Rocket
● Honorary Member, Advisory Board, Womens Business Collaborative (WBC)
Past Boards
● Executive Chair, Atonix Digital, LLC
● Member, Advisory Board, College of Engineering and Computing, George Mason University
Career
Barbie Bigelow is CEO of Emerald Growth Partners, where she helps leadership teams invest in the right technology to accelerate growth and maximize value.
Her corporate leadership experience includes P&L and C-suite technology roles at Fortune 50-200, PE-backed and private companies. Her executive experience includes serving as the first CIO for Lockheed Martin’s electronics business and as Jacobs Engineering’s Global CIO.
She helped form the Defense Industrial Base information sharing program, created standard maturity frameworks and led incident response for government and private enterprises. She brings deep technology expertise and corporate governance experience through her work advising boards and her roles at a diverse set of companies. Barbie began her career as a Statistical Data Analyst at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After completing graduate research at UT in parsing technology, she joined IBM and helped develop HTML.
As a first-generation college graduate, Barbie advocates for diverse talent in technology fields. Her commitment includes serving on the Board of Advisors for the University of Tennessee’s Tickle College of Engineering, chairing the Womens Cyber Governance Collaborative (WCGC), and mentoring/coaching leaders and entrepreneurs in cybersecurity, AI and sustainability ventures.
● Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry, Tusculum University
● Master of Science in Computer Science, University of Tennessee
● Strategic Decision and Risk Management Certificate – University of Texas McCombs School of Business
● Finance & Compliance Certificate – University of Maryland Robert B. Smith School of Business
Barbie is a DDN certified Boardroom Qualified Technology Expert (QTE) and she holds her Project Management Professional (PMP) qualification from the Project Management Institute.