Women’s Month is a strong moment to spotlight the leaders shaping cybersecurity across health, pharma, and medtech. This group reflects the breadth of the sector today: executives protecting patient data, securing global research and manufacturing environments, guiding enterprise AI adoption, and helping large organizations navigate risk in some of the most regulated and high-stakes operating environments in the world.
Sonia Arista — AVP, Business Information Security Office, Lead, CVS Health
Sonia Arista brings one of the most cross-functional backgrounds in this group, with leadership spanning provider, payer, digital health, and healthcare-focused security strategy. Her career includes CISO roles at Signify Health and Tufts Medical Center, along with healthcare security leadership positions at Fortinet and GuidePoint Security, giving her experience across enterprise operations, clinical environments, governance, compliance, and executive advisory work. Now at CVS Health, she stands out as a leader who has spent years translating cybersecurity into something healthcare organizations can operationalize at scale.
Sydney Klein — SVP, CISO & Head of Enterprise IT, Bristol Myers Squibb
Sydney Klein has built a career at the intersection of cybersecurity, enterprise technology, and large-scale transformation. At Bristol Myers Squibb, she has grown from CISO to a broader leadership role spanning enterprise IT, digital experience, and AI-enabled transformation, while maintaining responsibility for protecting one of the company’s most important assets: its data, systems, and innovation engine. With nearly two decades at Capital One before joining BMS, she brings both financial-services rigor and life sciences scale, making her one of the clearest examples of how cyber leadership is increasingly tied to business enablement and digital strategy.
Jennifer West — SVP, Chief Digital Trust Officer (CISO), Takeda
Jennifer West leads cybersecurity at Takeda with a background that cuts across pharma, medical devices, manufacturing, software, banking, and consumer services. That range shows in the scope of her leadership, which includes not only cybersecurity but also identity, risk management, compliance, and the broader trust infrastructure needed in a global biopharma environment. Her prior CISO roles at Catalent, Esri, Smith & Nephew, and ServiceMaster give her a rare mix of regulated healthcare and complex enterprise experience, positioning her as a leader who understands both operational resilience and the strategic role of cybersecurity in global growth.
Lakshmi Eleswarpu — Chief Technology & Business Enablement Officer, Elevance Health
Lakshmi Eleswarpu is the broadest technology executive in this slate, but she fits because her leadership clearly sits inside the modern enterprise trust and resilience conversation. Now leading technology and business enablement at Elevance Health after senior roles at Sanofi, Boeing, Coca-Cola, BT, HP, and Procter & Gamble, she brings deep experience in digital transformation at scale across some of the world’s largest organizations. In a healthcare company as large and operationally complex as Elevance, that kind of executive oversight has direct implications for security, resilience, and the safe delivery of technology across the enterprise.
Nidhi Luthra — Former Global Chief Information Security Officer, Baxter International
Nidhi Luthra earns a place on this list because of the depth and relevance of her recent leadership in healthcare and medtech, even without a current operating title listed here. At Baxter International, she served as global CISO for a Fortune 500 medtech manufacturer, leading cyber risk, resilience, regulatory assurance, and secure adoption of emerging technologies across a highly regulated global environment. Earlier roles at Abbott, AMITA Ascension Health, Presence Health, and Stericycle show a sustained track record in healthcare, life sciences, and connected operational environments, making her one of the strongest examples of a leader whose experience sits squarely in the center of this sector.
Securing What Modern Care Depends On
Healthcare, pharma, and medtech now depend on leaders who can protect far more than networks and endpoints. They need executives who understand patient trust, research integrity, manufacturing resilience, data governance, AI risk, and the operational realities of large regulated enterprises. The women in this feature represent that evolution clearly, and their work is helping define what strong cybersecurity leadership looks like in one of the most consequential sectors in the economy.
Explore more profiles of the amazing women shaping cybersecurity across numerous industries in our Women’s Month collection.