San Diego’s security community is unusually well organized for a city its size. The San Diego CISO Roundtable, the Cyber Center of Excellence, SIM San Diego, and the local InfraGard chapter all appear in the careers below, and several of these leaders sit on their boards. That infrastructure has a visible effect: two of the six now work for companies headquartered in Wisconsin and are still here, still serving on local boards. The city holds onto people. The other four secure a health system, a medical device maker, and two universities.
Terrence Weekes – CISO, Harley-Davidson
Terrence Weekes became CISO and Chief Privacy Officer of Harley-Davidson in March 2026, covering the motor company, its financial services arm, and LiveWire. He arrived from Jack in the Box, where he served seven years as CISO and latterly as VP of Enterprise Technology, overseeing corporate applications, infrastructure, service management, cybersecurity, and IT risk. Before that he was CISO and VP of Infrastructure and Operations at DJO, the orthopedic device maker, where the MotionMD platform earned HITRUST certification under his tenure. He worked as a virtual CISO for Optiv’s Office of the CISO, was Global Information Security Officer at Business Wire, and ran security operations at Caesars Entertainment. His foundation is defense: nearly five years at SPAWAR, finishing as Global Information Assurance Program Manager for the headquarters CIO office at the GS-15 equivalent level with a Top Secret clearance. He has chaired the San Diego CISO Roundtable board since 2020 and is treasurer of SIM San Diego.
Chase Franzen – CISO, Sharp HealthCare
Chase Franzen has been VP and CISO of Sharp HealthCare since August 2021, after three and a half years as its Director of IT Security. He oversees cybersecurity engineering, architecture, operations, and identity and access management for San Diego’s largest private employer, a system with more than 18,000 employees, four acute hospitals, three specialty hospitals, three medical groups, and an insurance plan. He came from Wells Fargo, where he spent eight years, first leading global information security teams covering cloud security, cryptography, endpoint, and database security, then running technology development and engineering for Investment Banking Capital Markets. His outside interests are unusually varied for a security executive: he is an FAA certificated flight instructor, owns a restaurant in Minneapolis, and ran a real estate development business for more than a decade. He sits on the board of the San Diego Cyber Center of Excellence.
Todd Friedman – CISO, ResMed
Todd Friedman has led information security at ResMed, the sleep apnea and respiratory device company, for more than a decade, including a stretch in 2018 and 2019 when he held the CISO role alongside co-CIO responsibilities. He came from Mattel, where he was CISO for nearly three years covering global security, PCI and SOX compliance, incident response, and protection of the toy company’s intellectual property. Before that he spent more than fifteen years at Universal Music Group, finishing as SVP and CISO with responsibility for information security across offices in 48 countries. His career began at Chicago Title Insurance, where he worked his way up from the mail room across a decade of IT roles and contributed to a McKinsey-led reengineering of the company. He frames security as a competitive advantage rather than a cost.
Konrad Fellmann – CISO, Modine Manufacturing
Konrad Fellmann became CISO and VP of Global IT Infrastructure at Modine Manufacturing in June 2026, working from San Diego. He arrived from Encore Capital Group, where he spent seventeen months as VP and CISO leading global cybersecurity strategy, GRC, security operations, and threat management across a specialty financial services business operating in multiple regulatory jurisdictions. The bulk of his career was thirteen years at Cubic Corporation, where he rose from Worldwide Director of Security to VP and CISO and later added IT infrastructure to the remit. There he expanded ISO 27001 certification from four sites to sixteen across North America, the UK, and Australia, standardized global compliance processes to cut audit costs, and ran risk assessments across more than 200 internally developed products.
Arlene Yetnikoff – CISO, UC San Diego
Arlene Yetnikoff became CISO and Executive Director of the Office of Information Assurance at UC San Diego in February 2024, arriving from Caltech where she spent nearly three years as CISO. Before moving to California she spent seventeen years as Director of Information Security at DePaul University in Chicago, and taught there as adjunct faculty. Her grounding is consulting: she was a principal at Arthur Andersen for eleven years and a director at Protiviti, and she taught as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Chicago for eighteen years alongside her operational work. Three major research universities in five years is a demanding sequence, and it has given her an unusually direct view of how security programs differ across institutions that look similar from outside.
Ricardo Fitipaldi – CISO, San Diego State University
Ricardo Fitipaldi has spent twenty-one years at San Diego State University and has been its CISO since September 2018. He joined in 2005 as a senior enterprise system administrator running Linux, Oracle, and Solaris infrastructure for more than 30,000 users, then moved into security as an analyst, where he consolidated firewall and DNS logs into Splunk to enable real-time monitoring, ran vulnerability assessments, and designed the campus VPN and multi-factor authentication. He also led the project that designed and architected SDSU’s Azure cloud infrastructure, owning its security design and prototyping a dedicated administrative management domain to protect high-value credentials. He has served as an Infrastructure Liaison Officer with InfraGard San Diego since 2016, the role that connects private sector security to the region’s law enforcement coordination center, and taught cloud architecture at UC San Diego Extension.
What This Group Says About San Diego
San Diego built a security community before it needed one, and the return on that is visible in this group. Weekes chairs the CISO Roundtable, Franzen sits on the Cyber Center of Excellence board, Fitipaldi runs InfraGard’s liaison role into regional law enforcement. Two of these leaders now report to headquarters two thousand miles away and have not moved, which in most cities would be a sign of a bench emptying out and here reads as the opposite. The Navy’s presence supplied the early expertise, healthcare and devices gave it somewhere to go, and the universities keep replenishing it.
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John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.