Madison is a state capital, a flagship university town, and an insurance hub, and its cybersecurity bench is shaped by all three. The four leaders below protect a research university, an academic health system, a mutual insurer, and a financial services company serving credit unions. Two of them have taught security at Madison Area Technical College. Three have spent more than two decades at a single employer.
Jeffrey Savoy – CISO, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jeffrey Savoy joined UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology in 1995 and has been there ever since. Most of that time went into incident response and security operations. He eventually served as Deputy CISO and Assistant Director of Cybersecurity Operations, leading incident response teams and the university’s vulnerability management program. He stepped in as interim CISO in July 2021 and was named Chief Information Security Officer that December. Savoy also spent more than six years as adjunct faculty in Madison Area Technical College’s Digital Forensics Certificate program, where he developed course material for the Network Investigation class and taught small device forensics.
Trish Verhage – Director of Information Security, UW Health
Trish Verhage started at UW Health in 1998 as a pharmacist assistant. She handled prescription order entry, worked with insurers on coverage, and helped test the pharmacy system. That testing work led to a systems analyst role in 2004, then into data security, where she became technical owner of the Epic provider and user master files. Verhage rose through data security supervision and spent nearly eight years as Systems Security Manager, leading a 24-person team covering identity and access management and Epic security. She served as interim director in 2024, leading 57 people across cybersecurity, GRC, and IAM, and was named Director of Information Security in August 2024. She has now spent more than 28 years at the health system. She holds a CISM.
Raymond Steinle – Director & Deputy CISO, TruStage
Raymond Steinle coordinated C-130 airlift operations across Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa from the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. That deployment came during nearly eight years in the Air Force Reserve, followed by two years as officer in charge of air terminal operations. His civilian career ran through network administration at U.S. Bank, operations leadership at an aviation components manufacturer, and five years leading Rockwell Automation’s Cyber Security Incident Response Team. He then led identity and access management engineering at Northwestern Mutual. Steinle joined TruStage in April 2018, where he directs a Cyber Fusion Center covering threat intelligence, detection and response, forensics, vulnerability management, and insider risk. He leads four managers and 20 professionals.
Jason Dahlby – Director, Enterprise IT Security, American Family Insurance
For most of his 23 years at American Family Insurance, Jason Dahlby designed networks. As a senior network, security, and communication architect, he built datacenter, security, and collaboration systems supporting nearly 3,700 offices. He managed the Network Engineering unit and then the Cyber Defense unit, which covered identity and access management and cyber defense engineering. Dahlby has directed enterprise IT security since March 2020, with a scope spanning cyber defense, cloud and application security, and architecture. Since November 2025 he has also taught IT and cybersecurity as a college instructor at Madison Area Technical College, passing on two decades of hands-on infrastructure and security work to the next generation of practitioners.
Teachers, Builders, and Lifers
This group builds its expertise slowly and passes it on. Savoy and Dahlby have both stood at the front of a classroom at Madison College, one teaching forensics and the other IT security. Savoy has spent 31 years at the university, Verhage 28 at the health system, and Dahlby 23 at AmFam. Steinle took the longer road, through airlift operations in the Air Force, manufacturing, and incident response, before settling into the Cyber Fusion Center he now runs. What connects them is depth. In a city whose largest institutions are a university, a hospital system, and insurers, the people defending them tend to know the systems because they helped build them.
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John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.