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SHARON SMOOT
Smoot is a unicorn — a Black woman overseeing 4,700 employees in the highly technical field of manufacturing components for nuclear reactors. Named last summer as head of the Lynchburg-based federal contractor’s nuclear division, Smoot spent 30 years as a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, ultimately serving as executive director for logistics, maintenance and […]
THOMAS HASTY
Although Virginia has had notable Black banking leaders — including Maggie Walker at the start of the 20th century — it’s still a business that has not had a lot of African American representation in the C-suite. In 1999, after working for BB&T, Hasty took control of his fate and became a co-founder of Suffolk-based […]
KEN AMPY
Growing up in rural Dinwiddie County, Ampy saw firsthand the power of community. After studying computer science at Old Dominion University, he built a career as a programmer analyst and developer for Dominion Virginia Power and Capital One Financial Corp. before launching staffing and consulting firm Astyra Corp. in 1997 in Richmond. Throughout, Ampy has […]
CHANDRA BRIGGMAN
The leader since 2020 of a Richmond-based innovation incubator that includes a biotech park, startup development and a newly invigorated cluster accelerator for pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, Briggman is off to a fast start. Growing up in a town of 2,000 in rural South Carolina, she was inspired by her parents to pursue innovation. “Neither […]
KEVIN M. WIDEMAN
In just over four years, Wideman has quintupled the annual revenues of his Fairfax County-based government contracting agency from $100 million to $500 million, expanding its workforce from 130 to more than 2,100 employees, and landing it multiple times on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing U.S. private companies. A Temple University electrical engineering […]
