Sylvia Acevedo

Sylvia Acevedo (born 1956/1957) is an American engineer and businesswoman. She was the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Girl Scouts of the USA from 2016 to 2020. A systems engineer by education, she began her career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she was on the Voyager 2 team. She has held executive roles at Apple, Dell, and Autodesk. In 2018, Acevedo was included in a Forbes list of "America's Top 50 Women In Tech". She was a founder, with 3 others of REBA Technology, an infiniband company that was sold and also the Founder and CEO of CommuniCard. As CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, Acevedo led the organization's largest release of badges, over 100 badges in STEM and Outdoors over three years. Early life and education Sylvia Acevedo was born near Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota where her father was serving as an officer in the military. Her family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico. She joined the Girl Scouts at age 7. She was active in the local Brownie troop, where she was encouraged to pursue her scientific interests in school. Acevedo collected newspaper articles about the space program and built Estes model rockets from a paper-and-plastic kits. In 1979 she earned a B.S. in industrial engineering from New Mexico State University. The National GEM Consortium awarded Acevedo with the GEM Fellowship to fund her graduate school studies at Stanford University. She was one of the first Hispanic students at Stanford University to earn a M.S. 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. Career