Tierney and her husband Greg Fairchild co-founded Resilience Education in 2013. As Executive Director, she leads the Resilience team by designing and delivering programs and developing partnerships to meet the needs of the individuals Resilience serves. Tierney has dedicated her career to building innovative solutions to address societal challenges. She spent 10 years at United Technologies Corporation (UTC) in human resources and community relations, where she led a corporate philanthropy initiative for CEO George David with the Hartford Public Schools, UTC’s headquarters and designed and implemented a strategic K-12 education reform initiative. Tierney was the founding executive director of the Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education at the University of Virginia, where she led the design and delivery of a portfolio of executive development programs for educators. At the PLE, Tierney was a pioneer in the field of turnaround leadership, leading the development of turnaround principals for then Governor Mark Warner.
As president of Socratic Solutions, Inc., Tierney consulted with national and regional organizations, state agencies, private foundations, and leading nonprofits around educational leadership challenges. Tierney has extensive media experience, her writing has been published in leading newspapers, and she co-authored The Turnaround Mindset in 2011. For the last decade, in addition to leading Resilience, Tierney has been deeply involved in racial equity at UVA, serving as inaugural chair of the UVA IDEA Fund, where she catalyzed efforts to address UVA’s relationship with slavery and served as chair of the Community Relations Task Force for the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University. She currently serves on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers Community Engagement Committee and is a member of the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. In 2021, she was appointed to the Governor's Board of Workforce Development in Virginia.
Dr. Fairchild earned her Ph.D. in Education Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, her M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and her B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.