Mentor Profile

Bio

Rick is the former VP and NC Healthplan CISO for Centene. He now focuses on advising venture capital firms and numerous cybersecurity startups and is on the Board of Advisors for several of both. He is a frequent speaker, podcast guest, and writer of papers topics ranging from cybersecurity, neurodiversity, and AI governance and ethics.

In his prior role, Rick worked as Virtual CISO supporting international companies. During that time Rick educated corporate boards, developed and matured security programs, and created the curriculum for a Cybersecurity Master’s degree program for an International University.

Rick spoke a cybersecurity conferences such as RSA, Secureworld, and FutureCon, and guest on The CyberWire Hashtable, CISO Series, Google Cloud, and The Rsnake Show. He on the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) CXO Trust Advisory Council, and the Boards of his local Charlotte ISC2 and CSA Chapters.

Rick is a member of the CIS Critical Security Controls editorial panel, and was a lead author on Version 8 of the Controls. Rick has a Cybersecurity YouTube channel where he recorded an overview of changes to each of the 18 new CIS CSC v8 Controls, an has recent Keynotes and other videos on cybersecurity and neurodiversity topics.

Rick has alternated between being a cybersecurity management consultant and CISO throughout his 25+ year cybersecurity career, and has led many ethical hacking, incident response and forensics, and risk management teams.

Prior Experience