Tricia Ball is the Acting Director of Marshall University’s Brad D. Smith Business Incubator. She is also the Associate Director of Marshall’s Lewis College of Business Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation (iCenter), where she is responsible for strategic and operational oversight, grant management, and program coordination. She also assists with curriculum development and content delivery.
Tricia is certified by Intuit as an Innovation Catalyst and by LEANSTACK in Continuous Innovation.
Tricia is a recent graduate of the inaugural class of the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Appalachian Leadership Institute, where she served as one of 40 Fellows from 13 states and one of only three representatives from the state of West Virginia.
Previously, she served as the Director of Marketing for the Appalachian Transportation Institute and Center for Business and Economic Research. In addition to marketing, her work focused on economic development initiatives, including strategic planning and tourism and broadband development.
Tricia also has professional experience in the field of experiential marketing, where she led an international team of 15 employees on the agency’s largest account while simultaneously serving as the lead on a new line of business. She began her career as a fraternity and sorority advisor at the University of Florida, specializing in organizational advising and leadership development education.
Tricia has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism (with a major in Public Relations) from West Virginia University and a master’s degree in Student Personnel in Higher Education from the University of Florida. She is originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, where she learned the transformative impact entrepreneurship can have from her hardworking, self-employed parents. Tricia and her husband, Christopher, have two sons, Aaden (7) and Ethan (4).
