Gaby Rowe, the project lead for Texas's Operation Connectivity, was born into a family of educators and social activists on the Upper West Side of New York City.  While her circuitous career has taken her from school principal to technology innovator to education policy and implementation consultant, Gaby’s focus has always been on high-impact projects that serve to transform the lives of young people and enable economic empowerment and opportunity. 

As a born and bred New Yorker, the early years of Gaby’s educational experience were in New York City, where she served as Head of School at The Mandell School for more than 15 years.  During those years, Rowe was engaged in the transformation of local education policy and was an advisor on the development of Universal Pre-K. 

Gaby moved to Houston in the summer of 2014 to take the helm of The Village School, a 2,000-student independent school in West Houston where she oversaw an $80 million campus expansion and transformed the school into a tech-enabled STEM institution focused on 21st-century skill development and 4^th industrial revolution careers. In 2018, Gaby made the jump full-time to technology and innovation, as the CEO of Station Houston, a startup accelerator, before becoming the founding Executive Director of the Ion, a $100 million innovation hub in Houston spearheaded by Rice University. 

In that role, Gaby secured the support of Intel, Microsoft, The City of Houston and others for the establishment of the Ion Smart and Resilient Cities Accelerator.  She helped bring DivInc and Greentown Labs to Houston and helped secure their permanent homes in the Innovation District. She has served on the Boards of Houston Exponential and TXRX, and has recently joined the Advisory Board for MITIE, the Houston Methodist Hospital Institute for Technology Innovation and Education and as an advisor to the University of St. Thomas’ Office of Innovation.  Rowe, as a Principal of Grow Associates, currently leads Operation Connectivity for Governor Abbot and the Texas Education Agency, which is an initiative to close the digital equity gap for students across Texas and is responsible for supplying more than 1.3M devices and $1B in support of closing the Digital Divide for Texas’ most under-resourced Students. 

Gaby has actively worked to promote diversity and inclusion for women and underserved minorities throughout her career and has been recognized by the Houston Business Journal as a "Woman Who Means Business", and by U.S. House of Representatives Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee as a Top Influential Woman of Houston.