Tennessee’s cybersecurity leadership community spans industries, organisation types, and career paths that resist easy categorization. The leaders in this feature come from automotive manufacturing, clean energy technology, higher education, and private equity-backed enterprise, reflecting the breadth of sectors where strong security leadership has become a strategic necessity. What connects them is a shared orientation toward building programs that are operationally sound, business-aligned, and capable of scaling with the organizations they protect.
Nagireddy Kudithini — Chief Information Security Officer and Technology Operations, Americas, Nissan Motor Corporation
Nagireddy Kudithini leads cybersecurity strategy and technology operations across Nissan’s Americas region, covering more than 100 manufacturing, office, and data centre locations across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile, with a workforce of approximately 30,000 employees. Before moving into the CISO role in 2023, he served as director and CTO for Nissan Americas, where he led enterprise cloud migration, digital workplace transformation, and a regional identity program deployment. His security tenure has included implementing AI-driven productivity tools, spearheading an enterprise-wide cybersecurity strategy that reduced risk exposure by more than 60 percent within 18 months, and ensuring compliance with standards including CCPA and ISO 27001. He was a finalist for the Nashville Technology Council Award in 2025 and has been recognized at the Tennessee ORBIE Awards.
Barbee Mooneyhan — Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Uplight
Barbee Mooneyhan joined Uplight as VP and CISO in early 2025, bringing more than twenty years of technology and information security leadership across public and private equity-backed organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 200 companies. Her program experience spans enterprise security, application and product security, threat intelligence, incident response, identity and access management, cloud and container security, data loss prevention, GRC, and privacy, with compliance depth across HITRUST, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, NIST, HIPAA, GDPR, and medical device security frameworks. Beyond her enterprise role, she serves as president of the WiCyS Tennessee Affiliate and vice president of the WiCyS BISO Affiliate, making her one of the more prominent advocates for women in cybersecurity across the state.
Gregg Kendrick — Chief Information Security Officer, Vanderbilt University
Gregg Kendrick brings more than twenty-five years of experience in cyber, intelligence, strategy, and information technology to his role at Vanderbilt University, with a career that includes senior security leadership at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Naval Intelligence, and a national-level cyber threat mitigation taskforce spanning the entire federal government. At HUD, he instituted cyber threat intelligence capability, developed zero trust architecture, built enterprise cybersecurity capacity, and enabled AI capability. At the intelligence community level, he led global IT infrastructure modernization, oversaw NOC and SOC capabilities, architected a cyber risk programme, and drove USCYBERCOM capacity improvements by 400 percent. That government and national security foundation gives his academic security leadership an operational and strategic depth that is uncommon in higher education environments.
Don Baham — Vice President of IT and Security, Chief Information Security Officer, Rubicon Founders
Don Baham leads strategic IT and cybersecurity initiatives at Rubicon Founders, a private equity-focused enterprise where his responsibilities span information security, digital infrastructure, IT governance, and regulatory compliance across complex, multi-entity portfolio organizations. His background includes experience securing private equity-backed healthcare portfolios and a prior career as president of a technology firm, giving him a business-first perspective on security that informs how he builds and leads teams. His approach emphasizes trust-based partnerships, culture transformation, and embedding security accountability into the fabric of the organization rather than layering it on as a control function.
What Tennessee’s cross-sector security leadership reflects
Taken together, these leaders point to something important about where cybersecurity leadership is headed: the most effective practitioners are increasingly those who can operate across organizational boundaries, technology environments, and business contexts that do not fit neatly into any single sector playbook. Whether securing a global automotive manufacturer, a clean energy technology platform, a major research university, or a private equity portfolio, the demands are similar: build programs that hold up under pressure, communicate risk in terms that resonate with business leadership, and develop teams capable of sustaining that work over time.
Explore more profiles of the leaders shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our CISOs to Watch collection.