Keynote Speaker

Robert Wood is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He leads enterprise cyber security, compliance, privacy, and counter intelligence functions at CMS and ensures the Agency complies with secure IT requirements while encouraging innovation.

As information technology has grown more complex with the advent of innovative technologies that enable rapid collection, storage and distribution of vast amounts of information and data, so too has the importance of safeguarding the privacy of health and other sensitive information collected by CMS. Our Agency is entrusted with the health information of over 100 million Americans, and it is our fundamental responsibility as stewards of this information to ensure its confidentiality is protected. Robert leads CMS’s efforts to ensure we meet the standards of excellence demanded by that stewardship responsibility, and protect it from bad actors both foreign and domestic.

Mr. Wood’s unconventional background that ranges from holding multiple CISO roles to leading red team programs affords him a unique perspective. Prior to CMS, Mr. Wood held CISO roles at Simon Data, SourceClear, and Nuns Health.
Earlier in his career,Mr Wood was a Principal Consultant for Cigital where he founded and led their red team assessment practice and focused on holistic adversarial analysis and remediation consulting for numerous Fortune 500 organizations which spanned across the cyber, physical, human, and operational domains that challenged the scope and effectiveness of traditional security program practices.

Mr. Wood has a B.S. in Information Management & Technology from Syracuse University.