Multimedia Gallery
Dr. Charles Barber, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer
Dr. Charles Barber is chief diversity and inclusion officer (CDIO) at the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Barber was appointed to the Senior Executive Service and assumed the duties as CDIO at NSF in January 2023. In this role, he serves as NSF’s senior advisor responsible for providing vision, strategic leadership and management for ongoing agency programs and new initiatives related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, or DEIA, in the NSF workplace and the STEM enterprise.
Prior to his appointment at NSF, Barber served as director of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs and was a primary author on the Task Force One Navy report that led to the Operational Navy’s DE&I Implementation Strategy. He is a TEDx speaker and served as the feature speaker on DEI at the 2022 DAU TEDx conference.
Barber has led a broad range of diversity efforts, development of culture intelligence capabilities, strategy, organizational leadership, critical data analysis and business transformation initiatives that have provided world class human resource and transformational leadership support to a dynamic range of public and private sector clients to include military service members, civilians and their families. With more than two decades of experience in human resources, diversity and inclusion, business transformation and cultural intelligence, he is a staunch advocate for efficiency, transformation and process improvement. He spearheaded development of the Army’s Soldier Record Brief while supporting the Army's Integrated Personnel and Pay System during one of the largest Army HR transformation efforts in the modern era. At the Defense Logistics Agency, he led the development of a culture intelligence framework that integrated transformational leadership principles within the DLA enterprise. As director of business transformation for the Department of Defense Vetting Directorate, he was a key contributor to the U.S. government’s security clearance and background investigation process improvement effort. He also previously served as the chief human capital officer for the District of Columbia courts.
Barber holds a doctorate degree in transformational leadership from Bakke Graduate University and other degrees in organizational leadership and business management from Columbia Southern University and Excelsior College. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a previous guest lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School’s Senior Executive Fellows Program for Political Science and Government. He is a U.S. Army veteran with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. A native of Bald Knob, Arkansas, he also starred as a sprinter on the Ouachita Baptist University and All Army track teams and achieved a personal best of 9.98 seconds in the 100-meter dash, and was recently inducted into the Arkansas Track and Field Hall of Fame (class of 2022).
Credit: Giovanni Rodriguez/NSF
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