Two of the CISOs on this list once worked inside the same hospital system’s security organization, and one of them now sits on a town council. Another built the security operations center for a state government partly with Purdue University students. Indianapolis doesn’t have the largest security community in the Midwest, but it has an unusually connected one, where healthcare, state government, pharmaceuticals, and banking share a bench that keeps crossing paths.
Andrea Abell – CISO, Eli Lilly and Company
Andrea Abell started out as a business analyst at Aon Hewitt and an instructional design manager before she ever worked in information security. She joined Lockheed Martin in Denver in 2000, managing the company’s response to enterprise IT audit findings and designing an internal assessment strategy to get ahead of risk and compliance issues. Over nearly 17 years there, Abell moved from audit remediation into the core of Lockheed’s Corporate Information Security organization. As a Senior Staff Information Assurance Engineer, she worked on incident response and recovery, perimeter defense, vulnerability management, and damage assessment. She left in 2017 to become CISO of NBCUniversal Media, a role she held for nearly six years. Abell has led security at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis since May 2023.
Hemant Jain – CISO, State of Indiana
Twenty years before he became CISO of the State of Indiana, Hemant Jain stood up the first Information Assurance team at the Defense Logistics Agency’s DRMS headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan. His path back to government security was long. It ran through IBM Global Services, a datacenter security company he co-founded in Las Vegas, and nearly a decade at NetApp, where he directed a $75 million professional services portfolio. Jain joined the State of Indiana in 2018 as Deputy CISO and Director of Security Operations, a newly created role. He built the state’s security operations center using both full-time staff and Purdue University students, and he more than doubled the team’s size. He was named CISO in March 2020. Today he leads cybersecurity for more than 100 executive branch agencies, commissions, and boards, with reach to more than 200,000 users in municipal government units across the state. Jain co-chairs the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Committee and serves on the Governor’s Indiana Executive Council on Cybersecurity. His recognitions include a CSO Award for Outstanding Business Value and CrowdStrike’s Hero Award.
Ron Duplessis – CISO, Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis
Before banking, Ron Duplessis spent nine years protecting part of the power grid. He joined the Midcontinent Independent System Operator in Carmel as a Cyber Security Analyst in 2006, managing corporate firewalls. He then led a seven-person security team and eventually managed MISO’s full cyber security program, which included NERC CIP compliance and a three-year improvement plan covering 11 security focus areas. Next came Zotec Partners, where Duplessis served as Vice President of Information Security and led the company to PCI DSS 3.2 certification. He joined the Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis in 2017 as Director of Security Operations and became CISO in July 2019. His technical foundation dates to his early career as a network engineer in Alexandria, Virginia, running a 450-node network across six sites, followed by intrusion detection and information assurance work at Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.
Cody Tyler – CISO & Managing Director, EXOS
Cody Tyler led a mission defense team at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, capping seven years in the US Air Force that also took him to Misawa Air Base in Japan and the Wichita area. After leaving the Air Force, he joined Raytheon in Indianapolis as a Senior Cyber Engineer. He moved to EXOS in 2020 as Cyber Security Manager and has been promoted four times since, through Director of Infrastructure Operations, Senior Director of Cybersecurity, and Managing Director. In February 2025 he became CISO and Managing Director. With just over 12 years in the field, Tyler is the youngest career on this list by a wide margin.
Mitch Parker – CISO, Indiana University Health
Mitch Parker has held the CISO title at two major academic health systems, back to back, for nearly 18 years. He was CISO of Temple University Health System in Philadelphia from 2008 to 2016, and during that period he also spent a year as Director of IT Operations at Temple University Hospital. He became CISO of Indiana University Health in September 2016 and has now led the system’s security program for a decade. His roots are technical. For more than 11 years, Parker worked as a systems architect at Diginexus Corporation, designing secure networks and high-performance databases for government and healthcare clients. He has also taught throughout his career, first as an adjunct professor at Temple’s Fox School of Business and, since 2018, as an adjunct lecturer of health informatics at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.
Nick Sturgeon – Cybersecurity Practice Lead & CISO, LUCIDIA iT
Nick Sturgeon serves on the Speedway Town Council, and he was its president in 2025. That public role sits alongside a security career that has moved through several of Indianapolis’s largest health systems. Sturgeon spent nearly five years as Executive Director of Information Security at Indiana University Health, then served as VP and CISO of Community Health Network from January 2024 to July 2026. That same month he joined LUCIDIA iT as Cybersecurity Practice Lead and CISO, where he builds cybersecurity programs for the firm’s clients. He also teaches and hosts. Since April 2018 he has produced the weekly CyberBites Podcast, which covers technology, policy, and Indiana’s tech and political scenes. He taught Ethical Hacking and Network Defense online at the University of Southern Indiana. As a graduate research assistant at Purdue Polytechnic, he helped develop a graduate-level cyber forensics course under a USAID grant.
A Bench That Keeps Crossing Paths
The strongest thread here is proximity. Parker and Sturgeon overlapped inside IU Health’s security organization for nearly five years before Sturgeon left to run security at Community Health Network. Jain built Indiana’s state SOC with Purdue students, and Sturgeon helped build a Purdue graduate course. Duplessis spent close to a decade in Carmel protecting grid operations before moving a few miles into banking. Abell and Tyler came in from outside, one from a national media company and the other from an Air Force base in the Pacific. Both landed in organizations whose security leaders already know each other. In Indianapolis, the security community is small enough that talent circulates rather than leaves, and each of these organizations benefits from that.
Discover more CISOs securing their organizations:
- The Inner Harbor’s CISOs to Watch
- Guarding the Peach State: Atlanta’s Security Leaders to Watch
- Securing the Capital Region: CISOs to Watch in the DMV
- Guarding the Steel City: Pittsburgh’s Security Leaders to Watch
- Securing the Bay: Tampa’s CISOs to Watch
John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.