Elizabeth Abelairas is a driven, empathetic, trusted, visionary, “big picture” strategic thinking business executive with over 25 years of experience in leading organization-wide technology and business alignment efforts focused on the organization’s competitive edge, business operations, and voice-of-the-customer.

She has held leadership roles in government, privately held and publicly owned organizations through periods of growth, transition, mergers, acquisitions and/or strategy realignment. Elizabeth’s most recent role was as the Director of Information Technology for UnitedHealthcare in Minnetonka, Minnesota. There she led a team of both state and non-state-side professionals to help the organization meet the business goals applying both tactical and strategic business solutions. She is a servant-leader who uses emotional intelligence, continuous mentoring, and the rooting of a safe “failing forward” practice to encourage innovation. Her keen ability to identify areas that technology alignment would enhance business operations has proven time-after-time to be an intuitive success. In addition, her track record of success has been reinforced by the application of Lean-Agile principles, attracting/retaining of high-caliber talent, and encouragement of professional growth at all levels. She has a strong belief that you are only as good as the whole team!

Elizabeth has a broad educational background; a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis on Management Information Systems, as well as, a Bachelor of Business Administration with a triple major in International Business, Management, and Marketing all from Florida International University. She is a Certified Project Management Professional by the Project Management Institute. Elizabeth holds a Scaled Agile Framework Certification by Scaled Agile, Inc. She is an Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner earned from Amazon Web Services.

Elizabeth has been an active member in the communities in which she has worked and lived. These volunteer activities include feeding the homeless, assisting with animal food preparation at Monkey Jungle, and assisting her elderly neighbors in installing and removing shutters during hurricane season.

Elizabeth takes pride in having a balanced work/family lifestyle. She is a dedicated mother of an amazing son, wife, and has three dogs. She considers herself to be a foodie and plans every vacation event based on where she would like to have as culinary experience. Elizabeth resides with her family in Miami, Florida.

As Avatar’s VP of Information Technology, she will be working closely with the management team to identify technology solutions that will support the business operations while having the flexibility to support the evolution of Avatar’s culture and customer base. Her top priorities will be to design an adaptive infrastructure and develop an agile workforce that can quickly adapt to consumer wants and needs by utilizing available Internet of Things and artificial intelligence technology that are crucial to the survival of today’s organizations. She will be exercising her leadership and management skills garnered in many Fortune 50 companies, and her broad-based experiences in voice-of-the-customer towards leading the functions of technology for the organization.