Guest Speaker - Colonel Heather Blackwell, Director of Cyberspace and Information Dominance, and Chief Information Offic

Colonel Heather W. Blackwell is the Director of Cyberspace and Information Dominance, and Chief Information Officer, Headquarters Air Combat Command, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia. She leads a staff and three subordinate units responsible for delivering strategic and enterprise-level cyberspace efforts to increase the U.S. Air Force's ability to provide combat forces to Combatant Commanders. Colonel Blackwell provides the strategic vision, policy, guidance and advocacy to drive the engineering and integration to build, extend, operate, secure and defend the Air Force portion of the Department of Defense global network. She is responsible to organize, train and equip cyberspace capability and communications for the command’s 35 wings, 1,000 aircraft, 12 bases and 242 worldwide operating locations with 156,739 total force military personnel.

Colonel Blackwell graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1997. She has served in a variety of assignments to include: Commander of the 81st Training Wing, Keesler AFB Mississippi, Commander of the 690th Cyberspace Operations Group at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, the Director of Legislative Affairs for U.S. Cyber Command, a National Security Fellow in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, an Assistant Executive Officer for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and as an Air Force Legislative Fellow for Senator Ben Nelson (D- NE) where she was responsible for his military and foreign relations portfolios.