Jorge de Cárdenas served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for American Campus Communities, Inc. since 2015, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology officer from 2012 to 2015, Senior Vice President of Information Technology from 2005 to 2012 and joined the company as Vice President of IT in 2004. Under Jorge’s technical leadership, American Campus became one of the top performing publicly traded real estate companies in the U.S., increasing its value from $300 million to $13 billion over the 18 years before being taken private by Blackstone. As an industry visionary, Jorge was featured in Hispanic Executive magazine highlighting lessons learned, including making mistakes as an integral part of innovation and growth in a tech industry. 

Prior to joining American Campus Communities, Jorge served as Director of Product Management for Emerging Technologies at Visa where he was responsible for defining product strategies and delivering application services to a global market. Jorge began his career developing software for NASA at Lockheed Engineering and Science. From 1991 to 1994, Jorge was a co-founder and principal consultant of Everest Technologies, Inc., an Oil & Gas IT consulting firm which was sold to SAIC, Inc. Between 1994 and 2000, he served in various capacities at technology startup companies including software architect, support manager, professional services manager, product management, and marketing. Jorge received a B.S. in Computer Science with specializations in Mathematics and Management from Texas A&M University and is CERT-certified in Cybersecurity Oversight from Carnegie Mellon University.

A constant innovator in the tech space, Jorge is also helping to raise the bar in arts education. He served as board president for the Austin School for the Performing and Visual Arts, since the school’s inception in 2006, which was founded to fill a void for students looking to pursue both academic and artistic excellence at a time when public school arts programs were among the first to face budget cuts.