Wisconsin’s higher education cybersecurity landscape spans a flagship research university, a statewide university system, regional campuses, technical colleges, and the network infrastructure that connects K-12 schools, libraries, and municipalities across the state. The CISOs in this feature are protecting student records, research data, financial aid systems, and the open academic networks that define the sector’s particular security challenge. Several of them have spent their entire careers inside the institutions they now protect. Others arrived from military service or the private sector with experiences that translate directly into the complexity of securing academic environments at scale.
Jeffrey Savoy — Chief Information Security Officer, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jeffrey Savoy has spent nearly thirty years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, starting in January 1995 as deputy CISO and assistant director of cybersecurity operations before serving as interim CISO and stepping into the permanent CISO role in December 2021. That near-three-decade tenure inside one of the nation’s leading research universities gives him an institutional depth that is genuinely difficult to replicate. His focus areas include incident response leadership, vulnerability management, and security controls implementation, and he is recognized as an incident response expert across the higher education security community. He also served as adjunct faculty instructor at Madison Area Technical College for nearly seven years, teaching in the Digital Forensics Certificate program and developing course material for network investigation, reflecting a commitment to building the next generation of security professionals alongside his institutional security responsibilities.
Ed Murphy — Associate Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, University of Wisconsin System
Ed Murphy oversees information security strategy for the entire University of Wisconsin System, presenting security plans and reports to the UW System President and Board of Regents and working across all UW institutions to protect systems and data using NIST standards as the governing framework. He joined the UW System in December 2018 as director of information security, moved into the CISO role in July 2019, and stepped into the AVP and CISO seat in March 2022. Before the UW System, he spent eight years at UW-Extension as director of application development and deputy CIO and CISO, and before that held technology leadership roles at the University of Arizona spanning application systems, web services, and enterprise resource planning. His career has been built almost entirely inside public higher education, giving him a deep understanding of the governance structures, consensus-driven cultures, and cross-institutional complexity that define security leadership at a multi-campus system level.
Steve Ranis — Chief Information Security Officer, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Steve Ranis has spent nearly sixteen years at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, serving as computer science administrator and security officer, then as information security officer, before stepping into the CISO role in June 2023. He also chairs the UW System Technology and Information Security Committee, a statewide governance role that extends his security influence well beyond his own campus. His philosophy is grounded in practical security rather than security theater, a distinction that reflects how he approaches both user education and institutional risk management. He describes his role as educating individuals and groups on practical ways to securely maintain their lives, a framing that reflects the particular challenge of higher education security: the people you are protecting are also the people who need to understand why protection matters.
Mitchell Huenink — Chief Information Security Officer, Fox Valley Technical College
Mitchell Huenink stepped into the CISO role at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton in April 2024, following nearly ten years as network security and infrastructure manager at the same institution. Before Fox Valley, he spent fourteen years as network operations manager at WOW Logistics, giving him an operational technology and logistics network background that is uncommon in higher education security leadership. He holds a CISM certification from ISACA and an associate’s degree in information technology from Fox Valley Technical College itself, making him a graduate of the institution he now helps protect. His career reflects a practitioner who built deep technical expertise in network operations before transitioning into security leadership, and who has applied that operational grounding to the specific challenges of securing a technical college environment.
Nathaniel Runge — Director of IT Operations and Chief Information Security Officer, Chippewa Valley Technical College
Nathaniel Runge has spent nearly nineteen years at Chippewa Valley Technical College in Eau Claire, progressing from senior user services analyst through senior system engineer and network operations director before stepping into the combined director of IT operations and CISO role in June 2025. Before CVTC, he worked in finance, insurance, and retail technology markets, giving him a private sector grounding before his long public sector tenure. His focus on mentoring the next generation of IT professionals and developing operations frameworks that reduce risk on attackable surfaces reflects how he has shaped his role at a technical college where the mission of workforce development and the demands of cybersecurity governance sit side by side. Holding both IT operations and CISO accountability simultaneously at a technical college reflects the operational reality of security leadership at that institutional scale.
Jason Downey — Chief Information Security Officer, WiscNet
Jason Downey served twenty-three years as a United States Marine in increasingly senior technology and cyber roles, including director of compliance at U.S. Cyber Command providing enterprise cyber governance for more than 50 Marine Corps departments, before transitioning into civilian security leadership. He joined WiscNet as CISO in October 2024, leading security strategy for a statewide research and education network serving K-12 schools, higher education institutions, libraries, and municipalities across Wisconsin. His work centers on building resilient public infrastructure and elevating cybersecurity maturity across resource-constrained member communities, including advancing zero trust architecture, developing scalable managed security services, and strengthening governance aligned to NIST, ISO, and CIS frameworks. He holds a Doctorate in Business Administration with research focused on cybersecurity success metrics for nonprofit and educational organizations, alongside a master’s in cybersecurity, an MBA with a cybersecurity focus, and a master’s in IT project management. That combination of Marine Corps cyber command experience, doctoral research in nonprofit security governance, and a mission to protect public institutions makes him one of the more distinctively credentialed security leaders in Wisconsin’s higher education community.
Wisconsin’s Campus Security Leaders Are Invested in the Mission
The leaders in this feature are not simply securing systems. They are protecting the environments where the next generation of Wisconsin’s workforce is being educated, where research that matters is being conducted, and where public institutions fulfill obligations to students, faculty, staff, and communities that extend well beyond any single security program. Several of them have spent decades inside the institutions they now lead from a security perspective. All of them understand that in higher education, security has to earn its place through trust, practical value, and genuine partnership with the people it is designed to protect.
Discover more cybersecurity leaders protecting the education sector:
- Oregon’s Higher Education Security Leaders: CISOs to Watch
- Missouri’s Academic Security Leaders: The CISOs to Watch Across the State’s Higher Education Landscape
- Where Arizona’s Higher Education CISOs Are Setting the Standard
- CISOs to Watch in Illinois’ Higher Education Sector
- CISOs to Watch in North Carolina’s Higher Education Industry
