Ms. Catherine S. Aucella serves as the Executive Director of the National Security Agency. In this capacity, she works with the NSA's Director and Deputy Director to provide leadership in all areas of the enterprise and to represent NSA's interests both internally and externally.
Ms. Aucella began her career at NSA as a linguist and an intelligence analyst. She has served in a variety of operational and corporate leadership positions, including tours as a senior leader within NSA's offices of counterterrorism, compliance, capabilities, and workforce support. Ms. Aucella led the effort to re-design and advance intelligence analysis by incorporating technology, automation and data science approaches into analytic workflows to support NSA analysts as well as their partners and customers. As the Deputy Director of Capabilities, she increased partnership opportunities across the Agency and Intelligence Community. Prior to her current assignment, Ms. Aucella was the Director of the Workforce Support Activities where she ensured the effective operation and integration of enterprise-wide human capital management, talent learning and development, security and counterintelligence, and installations and logistics. In this role, she led the NSA strategic effort to build and sustain a diverse and expert workforce, which overhauled NSA's hiring practices and promulgated workplace mitigations to foster a safe work environment.
Ms. Aucella has a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Washington University and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of Maryland Global Campus.