Beverly Barnhart
BS ’76, Physics, Math, and Music, Heidelberg College
MS ’79, Meteorology, Purdue University
MS ’06, National Security Strategy, National War College
"Purdue provided an intensive academic program, extremely dedicated instructors, and a number of amazing topics and speakers — who instilled the desire for continued lifelong learning."
An intelligence advisor on science and technology for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) for three decades, Beverly Barnhart has been a key analyst for many critical foreign nuclear programs. She brings incomparable expertise to her current faculty position in the School of Science and Technology Intelligence at the National Intelligence University (NIU) in Washington, D.C., where she chairs the Weapons of Mass Destruction and Information and Influence programs.
After researching severe storm dynamics in her graduate work at Purdue, Barnhart started her career in industry and government, working for ANSER on military space issues, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the U.S. Department of Energy lab review of nuclear reactor upgrades in the wake of Three Mile Island, and on the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative — or "Star Wars" — for Science Applications International Corporation.
In 1989, she began her decades of work as a science and technology analyst at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in areas such as the Iran nuclear program and Russia/Eurasia nuclear weapons design and testing. Barnhart was a senior advisor to the Office of the Secretary for Defense and a DIA liaison to a national security special collection office before earning her master’s degree in national security strategy at the National War College in Washington, D.C. She then returned to the DIA to serve as a technology steward and in several science and technology advising and committee roles before joining the NIU faculty in 2016.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
- Senior Intelligence Officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency
- Intelligence Advisor for Senior Office of the Secretary of Defense Policymakers in the Pentagon
- Defense Intelligence Agency Technology Steward for Emerging Energy Technologies
- Professor and Program Chair in the School of Science and Technology Intelligence at the National Intelligence University
- Purdue College of Science Alumni Advisory Board