Gwynne Shotwell (née Rowley, previously Gurevich; born November 23, 1963) is an American businesswoman and engineer. She is the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, an American space transportation company, where she is responsible for day-to-day operations and company growth.
As of 2023, Shotwell is listed as the 31st most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. In 2020, Time magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2018, she was listed as the most powerful female engineer by Business Insider.
Early life[edit]
Shotwell was born in Evanston, Illinois, as the middle of three daughters to a brain surgeon and an artist, and was raised in Libertyville, Illinois. In 1982, she graduated from Libertyville High School. In 1969, she watched a television broadcast of the Apollo 11 mission with her family, but remembers finding it “boring” and was not interested in space at the time. Shotwell excelled in both academics and athletics in high school, where she was on the cheerleading and varsity basketball teams while achieving at the top of her class. Her interests changed during high school after her mother took her to a panel discussion at the Illinois Institute of Technology by the Society of Women Engineers, where a mechanical engineer in particular inspired Shotwell to become an engineer. Following this, she decided to apply to Northwestern University, where she received a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, and later a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics.
Career[edit]
At the beginning of her career, Shotwell had an interview with IBM on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which disturbed her and she did not get a job offer. Instead, Shotwell took a job in the automotive industry at Chrysler Corporation‘s management training program, which she initially enjoyed but later grew tired of and left to return to Northwestern for her graduate degree.
In 1988, Shotwell began work at the El Segundo research center of The Aerospace Corporation, and did technical work on military space research and development contracts. An early project she worked on was STS-39. During a ten-year tenure, she worked in thermal analysis. Shotwell worked in both space systems engineering and project management positions.
She left The Aerospace Corporation in 1998 to become director of the space systems division at Microcosm Inc., a small rocket company in El Segundo. There, she served on the executive committee and was responsible for business development.
