Dallas-Fort Worth has an unusually traceable security lineage. Four of the seven leaders below came up through airlines, three of them at American, and their paths keep crossing: two overlapped at American in the mid-2010s, two more at the DTCC a few years later. The Metroplex produced a generation of security leaders inside operations that cannot stop, and they have since spread across a city government, a public hospital system, a global real estate firm, a healthcare performance company, an insurer, and a multi-industry holding group. Most of them now sit in the same room at DallasCISO, the regional peer network.
James L. Wilkinson – CEO, Ethan Solutions
James L. Wilkinson brings twenty-six years of military service and a Fortune 200 career to Ethan Solutions, the veteran-owned technology and risk advisory firm he founded in 2020, delivering CIO and CISO-level leadership to regulated enterprises across government, financial services, and critical infrastructure. His last uniformed assignment was Chief of Cyber Mission Forces at US Army Cyber Command, running a $60 million program office that built the training pipeline for the teams defending Department of Defense networks, following fourteen years in the Marine Corps and a posting as Deputy CIO of Joint Task Force Civil Support. In the private sector he was CIO for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program, overseeing cybersecurity across classified and unclassified environments and a global supplier ecosystem, then spent three and a half years as SVP of Technology Infrastructure and Operations at MUFG Americas, briefing audit committees and regulators against FFIEC, GLBA, SOX, and OCC expectations. He also served as an information security officer at Wells Fargo through its $32 billion GE Capital acquisition, and was an Executive IT Fellow at Microsoft reporting to the CTO.
Becky Palmer – VP and CISO, National Life Group
Becky Palmer is the connective tissue of the Dallas security community. VP and CISO of National Life Group since 2020 and based in Dallas, she has chaired the DallasCISO advisory board since 2023, having previously served as vice-chair and program chair of the North Texas peer network. She won the 2025 DallasCISO ORBIE Award in the enterprise category for organizations above $2 billion in revenue. Before National Life she spent four years as Deputy CISO at CDW, responsible for the reseller’s global information security practice across strategy, security operations, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and incident response. The foundation was twenty years at United Airlines, where she began as a developer, managed applications development for flight operations, safety, and maintenance, ran the identity and access management program, and finished as Director of IT Security Systems covering continuous monitoring, datacenter, endpoint, and mainframe security.
David Bell – SVP and CISO, CBRE
David Bell has been SVP and CISO of CBRE, the commercial real estate services firm, since January 2024. He arrived from American Airlines, where he spent nearly seventeen years and served five and a half as Managing Director of Cybersecurity and Technology Risk Management, the carrier’s CISO. His path there was unusually broad for a security chief: five years running information systems security, a year in platform hosting, then five years as Managing Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services before returning to security at the top. Before American he spent nearly six years as an associate director at Arthur Andersen and Protiviti, and eight years at Citi and The Associates, finishing as Vice President for eCommerce Infrastructure and Security Services. He is a 2026 DallasCISO ORBIE nominee.
Bruce McDaniels – VP and CISO, Parkland Health
Bruce McDaniels has spent more than seventeen years at Parkland Health, the public hospital system serving Dallas County, and became its VP and CISO in August 2019. The three years before that he was VP of IT Operations, responsible for server and workstation engineering, the data center, networking, service management, and IT operations at Dallas County’s correctional facilities, and before that he directed IT service management for nearly seven years. His route into security came through delivery rather than defense: program and PMO management at PepsiCo, large-scale infrastructure programs at GMAC Mortgage including an Exchange and Active Directory migration for more than 10,000 users, project leadership at Blockbuster, and five years of IT management at TXU. He began as a systems engineer at Frito-Lay. He is a 2026 DallasCISO ORBIE nominee, and Parkland’s zero-trust work has been published as a vendor case study.
Juli Cunningham – CISO, Vizient
Juli Cunningham became CISO of Vizient, the healthcare performance improvement company, in December 2024. She arrived from McKesson, where she spent thirteen years, most recently two and a half as Vice President of Information Security, and before that as business information security officer for the prescription technology solutions division and senior director of global identity services. The first seven years there were in technology leadership rather than security, which shapes how she frames the role: her stated focus is execution, delivery, and change management, with expertise in client-facing solutions and optimizing technology footprints for business outcomes. Earlier she was a director at Waste Management, a managing director at BNY Mellon leading a global team serving the structured products division, and a vice president at JPMorgan acting as the interface between the CDO business line and the technology division. She is a 2026 DallasCISO ORBIE nominee.
Chandan Kochhar – CISO, City of Plano
Chandan Kochhar has been CISO of the City of Plano since March 2025, bringing nearly two decades across federal and state government, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and transportation. He came from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, where he spent two and a half years as Director of Cybersecurity Engineering for the financial market infrastructure that clears and settles the majority of US securities transactions, and before that three and a half years as a senior lead technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton. He was also a cybersecurity vice president at Bank of America and a risk consultant at Mary Kay. The foundation was seven and a half years leading information security at American Airlines. His stated strengths run to security engineering and operations, GRC, incident response, and presenting threat posture and roadmaps at C-level.
Charles Valdes – CISO, Leon Capital Group
Charles Valdes is a founding CISO by habit. Appointed in February 2025 to build Leon Capital Group’s first comprehensive security, data privacy, and AI security program, he protects a multi-industry holding company spanning financial services, healthcare, and real estate, with more than 9,000 employees and 12 million customers, and his GRC work supported the firm’s attainment of its Registered Investment Advisor and Broker-Dealer licenses. He has deployed both generative and agentic AI across the security stack, covering analyst augmentation, log triage, autonomous threat response, and compliance monitoring. His eighteen years include Deputy CISO at Trellix, interim CISO at Mitek Systems, and an SVP role at U.S. Bank where he rebuilt the vulnerability management program and drove the bank to the top BitSight rating among its peers, saving more than $3 million annually through penetration testing redesign. He was Executive Director of Global Security Engineering and Operations at DTCC, CISO at Kubota North America, and a senior security manager at American Airlines. He is a 2026 Dallas ORBIE CISO of the Year finalist and holds CISSP, CISM, C|CISO, and CDPSE.
What This Group Says About Dallas-Fort Worth
The Metroplex did not import its security leadership. It grew it, largely inside two airlines and a handful of large regulated employers, and then watched it disperse into the institutions that keep the region running: the city, the county hospital, the utilities of commerce. That shared formation shows in how this group works. Airline security teaches you that the system cannot go down, that regulators are permanent fixtures, and that the business will not wait. Four of these seven learned that lesson on the flight line, and all seven now apply some version of it at the board table.
Discover more cybersecurity leaders:
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- Seattle’s CISOs to Watch: Security Leadership Across the Sound
- Montreal’s CISOs to Watch: Securing Quebec’s Critical Systems
- CISOs to Watch in Amsterdam: From Payments to Public Transport
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.