Our Executive Mentors

Suzi McBride

Mrs. Suzi McBride is the Chief Operations Officer and Board Member at Iridium Communications Inc., the only company that offers truly global voice and data coverage to connect everyone to the things that matter most. She serves as a Director on the Iridium board as well as an independent Director at Skyworks and Finite Carbon.

She is responsible for leading all Iridium® network operations, including the satellite constellation and associated ground gateways and terminals. Mrs. McBride is also responsible for all technology innovation on Iridium’s network, including the development and manufacturing of subscriber equipment, new services and applications.

Prior to this role, Mrs. McBride served as the Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of OneWeb’s Program Office. While in this position, she built up OneWeb's team of engineers and oversaw the system design, production and testing of the ground and space networks as well as user terminal development.

Mrs. McBride has more than 30 years of experience, including building and launching the original Iridium satellite constellation while at Motorola's Satellite Communications Group as a senior engineer in the 1990s. During her first tenure at Iridium, lasting over nine years, Mrs. McBride served as Vice President of Program Management and Launch Services, playing a key leadership role in developing the Iridium NEXT system, leading launch strategy, engineering and hosted payload programs. Mrs. McBride also held the position of Program Manager at General Dynamics (later Orbital ATK and now Northrup Grumman) where she managed NASA and U.S. Air Force satellite programs.

Mrs. McBride received her MBA from the University of Tennessee in the Executive Aerospace and Defense program, and her dual undergraduate degrees are from Columbia University in Industrial Engineering and Claremont McKenna College in Management Engineering.