Spokane’s cybersecurity leaders tend to grow into the job from somewhere else. One of the five below spent 22 years as a medical technologist in the city’s hospital labs before moving into health IT and then security. Another wrote software for Boeing and managed cyber projects at Lockheed Martin before taking charge of security for the city. A third started as a full-stack web developer at the university he now protects. Together they defend a public university, city government, a credit union, a healthcare IT services firm, and a bankers’ bank.
Colin Turnbull – Director, Information Security & CISO, Eastern Washington University
Colin Turnbull has spent more than 18 years at Eastern Washington University. He started in 2008 as a full-stack developer, then spent nearly eight years as security manager and engineer, running penetration tests, building an integrated detection stack with Arkime, Suricata, Elastic, and the Shuffle SOAR platform, and writing Python runbooks to automate remediation. He became Director of Information Security and CISO in July 2018. Since then he has led the move from an on-premises data center to a cloud-first infrastructure, rolled out Duo multi-factor authentication to more than 80,000 users, and launched mandatory security awareness training for more than 2,000 faculty and staff. He also served as the university’s interim Associate Vice President for IT and CIO from July 2025 to April 2026. He holds a CISSP.
Dan Wordell – CISO, City of Spokane
Dan Wordell started as a software engineer at Boeing Computer Services, then spent more than 11 years at Lockheed Martin as a cybersecurity project manager. He came home to Spokane in 2008 to supervise the IT service center at Spokane Public Schools for more than seven years. After a stint as information security manager at Kochava in Sandpoint, Idaho, he became CISO of the City of Spokane in September 2016. He oversees citywide efforts to protect the city’s systems and data, and formalized the security and internal control standards the city has adopted.
Tony Trunkhill – VP, Information Technology, Numerica Credit Union
Tony Trunkhill joined Numerica Credit Union in 2010 as a network security engineer. He investigated security events and suspected attacks, ran the annual IT audit program alongside internal audit, tracked security exposures through remediation, and built security awareness training for new hires. After a short contract as a security engineer at Avista, he moved into leadership at Numerica as Vice President of Information Technology. He leads the credit union’s information security program while overseeing IT infrastructure, vendor management, the technology budget, and capacity planning.
Robin Peterson – Director of Information Security & Compliance, Engage
Robin Peterson worked as a medical technologist in Spokane-area hospitals and clinics for 22 years, including Deaconess Medical Center, and served as laboratory manager at Shriners Hospital in Spokane. He moved into health IT as a laboratory systems analyst at INHS, then worked as a MEDITECH clinical applications analyst at Rockwood Health System. There he became enterprise applications manager, leading 17 to 20 analysts through an EHR upgrade, CPOE implementation, and the ICD-10 conversion, guiding the system through a Deloitte enterprise risk audit, and serving as interim IT director. He joined Engage, a consulting and support firm for hospitals, in 2016 as a lead systems analyst, became an account manager, and has served as Director of Information Security and Compliance since November 2019. He holds a degree in medical microbiology and bacteriology from Washington State University.
Kevin Swatzell – Information Security Officer, PCBB
Kevin Swatzell spent nearly a decade as VP and Chief Cybersecurity Officer at Columbia Bank in Spokane, serving as its board-appointed information security officer. He built the bank’s enterprise security and governance, risk, and compliance program on NIST and CIS frameworks and acted as technical lead for FDIC and state examinations. He then built an IT risk management program for Sterling Bank & Trust as a consultant and served as director of information security for American Challenger, a startup bank that ceased operations in 2022 after failing to raise capital. Swatzell has been Information Security Officer at PCBB, Pacific Coast Bankers’ Bank, since September 2022, working remotely from the Spokane area. He is a graduate of Whitworth University and the Pacific Coast Banking School, and holds CRISC and C|CISO certifications.
Rooted in the Inland Northwest
Spokane’s security community is shaped by people who stayed or came back. Turnbull has spent his whole career at Eastern Washington University, moving from developer to CISO and briefly CIO. Wordell returned from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to run IT at the city’s public schools and then security at City Hall. Peterson spent four decades in Spokane healthcare, first in the lab and then in IT. Trunkhill and Swatzell built their security careers protecting the region’s financial institutions. In a mid-sized city where many of the same institutions anchor the economy for decades, these leaders bring deep local knowledge to the work of defending them.
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John Kevin Hao is a news and feature writer covering cybersecurity, technology, and business targeted for professional audiences.