In her senior leadership role, Beth Galetti '93 manages the recruitment, growth and development of Amazon's 560,000-plus global workforce—one of the largest and fastest-growing workforces in the tech industry. She is currently the only woman on founder Jeff Bezos' so-called S-team, a group of 19 senior executives, and has input into the company's most important decisions. Earlier this year, when Amazon announced with fellow titans JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway a new health care venture to address rising health care costs, Galetti was tapped to serve as Amazon's leader for the partnership.
That Galetti would soar to such heights professionally should not surprise anyone who knew her at Lehigh, where she was president of the Society of Women Engineers and a teaching assistant. Excelling in math, she had left high school in Maryland early—at age 16—to come to Lehigh, where she would pursue her degree in electrical engineering.
"I can't thank Lehigh enough for taking a chance on me like that," Galetti says, reflecting on her early admission. "It launched me. And as a young person, I was anxious to launch."
After graduation, Galetti went on to work for MCI Telecommunications Corp., and then FedEx, where relatively early in her career, she took on the responsibility of managing software development for the company's package tracking system. In 2013, she joined Amazon.
Read the full story in the Summer 2018 Lehigh University Bulletin.
