Philip V. Holberton

Philip V. Holberton (born 1942) is an American business executive, entrepreneur and professor of Leadership at Brandeis University. He has been a cofounder of two biotech firms in the Greater Boston area.

Holberton was President and CEO of proteomics company Differential Proteomics, Inc. (Beverly, Massachusetts), before running out of funding. After retiring, Holberton became a chair for Vistage International.

Holberton a CPA, spent his career in the financial aspect of business until the mid-1990s. It included financial positions with Cambridge NeuroScience, General Cinema Theatres, Genome Therapeutics, and Becton Dickinson & Company. Before that he was an outside auditor for Avon Products, Inc.

In 1996, he accepted an adjunct faculty appointment at Brandeis' Rabb School to teach in a brand new program - Masters of Software Engineering. He taught and still teaches Organizational Leadership.

His consulting firm, the Holberton Group, publishes a periodic online bulletin, Speaking of Leadership.

Holberton is a past president of the Financial Executives Institute's Boston Chapter of 1,000 financial officers, and vice chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge.

Holberton is the son of Robert Maynard Holberton and Charlotte Stone Holberton and nephew of Betty Holberton. Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. A new school, Holberton School was founded in 2015 in her honor. Holberton lives in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire with his wife Anne Blodget. Holberton has three children, Matthew (Matt), Alexandra (Lexi) and Philip, Jr (Tod). Phil and Anne are also the grandparents of Alexander, Elizabeth (Liza), William (Trip), Benjamin & Phoebe.

The members of the Holberton family living in the United States of America are of relatively recent English descent. Philip's father, Robert Maynard Holberton (1908-1994) was the son of Robert Francis Holberton, who was born at Teddington in London in 1873 and left England to settle in Virginia circa 1899; he died there in 1937. Robert's younger brother Richard Bartle Holberton (1876-1972) and sister Janet (1881-1975; Mrs Herbert Marshall) also settled in Virginia. Their father was Edmund Robert Holberton (1843-1886), a merchant, whose mother was born Fanny Hughes Twining in London in 1810. Fanny, who married Thomas Henry Holberton, a doctor, was a member of the well-known family of tea merchants, Twinings of the Strand in London. A full account of the family is given in The Longcrofts: 500 Years of a British Family by James Phillips-Evans (pub. 2012, Amazon UK), by virtue of the fact that Fanny's mother, Elizabeth Mary Twining née Smythies, was the daughter of the Rev. John Smythies of Colchester in Essex and his wife, Elizabeth Longcroft.