L3Harris Technologies has appointed Kimberly Fields to its board of directors, placing the chair, president and chief executive officer of specialty materials producer ATI Inc on the board of one of the largest defence and aerospace suppliers in the United States.
The appointment was announced on 22 October 2026 from the company's headquarters in Melbourne, Florida. Fields joins as an independent director while continuing in her executive role at ATI Inc.
Sam Mehta, President and Chief Executive Officer of L3Harris Technologies, said Fields brings an exceptional track record of scaling operations and driving sustained performance. Her operating background sits close to the supply side of the defence industrial base, where materials availability and production throughput have become the binding constraints on delivery rather than order intake.
Fields has spent her career in industrial manufacturing. She joined ATI Inc in 2019 as executive vice president of its flat rolled products group, and went on to lead both of the company's operating segments. She was named chief operating officer in 2022 and president in 2023, took over as chief executive the following year, and became chair of the board earlier this year. Before joining ATI Inc she was group president of industrial and energy at IDEX Corporation, and she held earlier operating and strategy roles across metals, energy and building products businesses.
ATI Inc supplies titanium, nickel-based alloys and other high performance materials into aerospace and defence programmes, which makes the appointment an unusually direct line of sight for an L3Harris board that spends much of its time on production rates. Fields is one of a small number of serving chief executives of listed industrial companies to hold a seat on a major prime contractor's board.
The appointment continues a period of board renewal at L3Harris Technologies. The company named Mehta president and chief executive officer earlier in the year, and has been reshaping both its portfolio and its governance as it concentrates on national security markets. Adding a sitting materials chief executive gives the board a perspective on upstream capacity that is ordinarily reached only through management reporting.
For ATI Inc, the seat extends Fields's visibility among the prime contractors that buy its output. For L3Harris Technologies, it adds a director whose operating experience is in the part of the chain where aerospace and defence programmes have most often slipped in recent years.
Fields holds her new seat alongside the existing directors of L3Harris Technologies, and the company did not disclose which board committees she will join.
