Dr. Barbara Wixom is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Since joining MIT CISR in 2013, she has led the MIT CISR Data Research Advisory Board—a network of roughly 100 senior data and analytics executives from global organizations who help guide, inform, and participate in cutting-edge research to advance the practice of data analytics. Prior to her time at MIT, she served as a tenured faculty member at the University of Virginia.

Recognized for her dedication to education and pedagogical excellence, Dr. Wixom was twice awarded the UVA All-University Teaching Award (2002 and 2010). In 2017, she received the Teradata University Network Hugh J. Watson Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the data and analytics academic community. Beyond the traditional classroom, she is a passionate advocate for broadening participation in STEM, actively working to encourage women, young people, and underrepresented populations to pursue data-related careers.

Dr. Wixom’s research focuses on how organizations generate business value and financial returns from data assets and data monetization. Utilizing large-scale surveys, meta-analyses, lab experiments, and in-depth case studies, her work has earned five placements in the Society for Information Management (SIM) Paper Awards competition. She is widely published in leading journals, including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, MIS Quarterly Executive, and MIT Sloan Management Review. In 2021, she received the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Outreach Practice Publication Award for her data monetization research, and in 2023 she authored Data is Everybody's Business (MIT Press) to make data monetization accessible across all organizational levels.

Globally engaged across academia and industry, Dr. Wixom serves as an International Expert Panel Member for the Centre for Information Resilience (CIRES) in Australia, collaborates on research with international scholars at the Universities of Queensland and Melbourne, and serves as an external examiner for doctoral research. She regularly presents her findings to academic and executive audiences worldwide.