Sylvia Acevedo


Sylvia Acevedo is an American engineer, businesswoman, and executive. She is chief executive officer of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Acevedo was elected to this position in May 2017, having been interim CEO since June 2016. She had been on their board of directors from 2009 to 2016. In 2018, she was included in a Forbes list of "America's Top 50 Women In Tech".
A systems engineer by education, she has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she was involved in Voyager 2's flyby of Jupiter in 1979. She has also worked at Apple, Dell, and Autodesk.

Early life and education

Sylvia Acevedo was born near Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. As a young child, her family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico. She was active in her own local Brownie troop as a child, where she was encouraged to pursue her scientific interests in school, despite receiving discouragement from the school's faculty. In 1979 she earned her B.S. at New Mexico State University studying industrial engineering, and would later go on to attend Stanford University, becoming one of the first Hispanic students to earn a Masters of Science at the school - in systems engineering. In her memoir, "Path to the Stars," Acevedo revealed that it was stargazing on her first Brownies Girl Scout trip that ignited her interest in science.

Engineering career

Shortly after graduating from New Mexico State University, Acevedo began working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a rocket scientist, developing programs for the Voyager 2 and analyzing data from the probe. She eventually left NASA to attend graduate school. During her time at Stanford, she worked at IBM as an engineer to help pay for her tuition. After graduating, she joined Apple as a technology executive for the Asia-Pacific region. She has also worked in an executive capacity for Dell and Autodesk. Under her tenure, the Girl Scouts introduced a series of badges in robotics, coding, engineering, and cybersecurity.