Lea Kissner receives 2026 CyLab Distinguished Alumni Award

Lea Kissner, Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President at LinkedIn, has been named CyLab's 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.

The award recognizes CyLab alumni who have made significant contributions to cybersecurity and privacy through research, leadership, innovation, and service to the broader community.

A Ph.D. alum from the School of Computer Science, Kissner has built a career at the intersection of security, privacy, trust, and technology policy. From pioneering infrastructure security work at Google to leading security transformations at organizations including Zoom and Twitter, Kissner has helped some of the world’s most widely used technology platforms address complex challenges involving data protection, secure systems design, and user trust.

“I tend to like security, privacy, trust, and safety,” said Kissner. “Combatting all of the terrible things on the internet are the fields that I work in. It’s very much a team sport. We’re just trying to make things better.”

Kissner’s journey in security and privacy began with a love of mathematics. During their Ph.D. studies at Carnegie Mellon, Kissner focused on cryptography, a field that allowed them to explore complex mathematical concepts while solving practical security problems.

“I went to grad school because I just wanted to do math things,”  said Kissner. “I got to go and solve interesting puzzles all day.”

Their research explored new ways to apply mathematical techniques to cryptographic challenges. Kissner credits their time at Carnegie Mellon with giving them the opportunity to explore difficult problems deeply while learning from leading researchers, including advisor Dawn Song, as well as faculty mentors Manuel Blum and Mike Reiter.

During their time at CMU, Kissner also built connections with researchers who would continue to influence the future of privacy engineering, including Lorrie Cranor. Their collaboration later extended into industry and community-building efforts, including the creation of the USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR), a conference designed to bring together practitioners and researchers advancing privacy engineering.

“When we started PEPR, privacy engineering was a very small field,” said Kissner.

After completing their Ph.D., Kissner moved from academic research into industry, where they applied their technical expertise to some of the world’s largest technology systems.

At Google, Kissner played a key role in developing and improving infrastructure security systems used across the company. They contributed to foundational security efforts, including work related to BeyondCorp and Zanzibar, a large-scale access control system that has influenced modern approaches to authorization.

They also served as Google’s Global Lead for Privacy Technology, helping guide privacy engineering efforts and initiatives, including those related to regulatory requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Their work at Google spanned technical architecture, privacy reviews, incident response, and collaboration with policymakers and regulators.

Kissner says their transition from cryptography research to large-scale systems engineering required learning how to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world environments.

“I was lucky enough to work with a lot of really smart people who were kind enough to answer many basic questions, and tell me when things were about to go wrong,” they said.

Kissner’s career has often placed them at organizations facing urgent security challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they joined Zoom as the company worked to rapidly strengthen its security and privacy practices amid unprecedented global adoption of its platform.

At the end of the day, we are fundamentally trying to protect people.

Lea Kissner, CISO and VIce President, LinkedIn

At Zoom, Kissner helped address challenges ranging from encryption and software design to user-facing security improvements. They also worked with customers navigating the difficult balance between maintaining operations and implementing critical security updates.

“I literally had to tell customers, ‘you have to upgrade or nobody gets their security problems fixed,’” Kissner recalled. “Security is about solving problems, and sometimes solving problems means helping people understand why something needs to change.”

Kissner later joined Twitter, where they served as CISO, Distinguished Engineer, and Vice President, leading efforts to improve security, privacy, and trust and safety systems. They emphasized that effective cybersecurity is often rooted in improving how organizations build and operate technology.

“About 90 percent of security is just making your system work right in the first place,” said Kissner.

Today, Kissner serves as CISO and Vice President at LinkedIn, where they continue to focus on building secure, trustworthy technology at global scale.

Kissner sees cybersecurity as an increasingly complex challenge as attackers adopt new tools, including artificial intelligence, to accelerate their efforts. But they believe the fundamentals remain the same: understand the people and systems being protected, build technology responsibly, and work collaboratively across disciplines.

Kissner encourages students and early-career professionals interested in cybersecurity careers to focus on solving meaningful problems over completing tasks.

“Your job is not to do an activity,” Kissner explained. “Your job is to go solve problems. If  you find important problems that you’re good at solving, and go solve them, you will have a much better and more interesting career, and you will do a lot more good in the world.”

Kissner also emphasizes that communication is an essential technical skill. Security professionals must be able to explain risks, collaborate with others, and understand the real-world impact of the systems they build.

“If you don’t understand why something matters to people, you can’t make good decisions about it,” said Kissner. “At the end of the day, we are fundamentally trying to protect people.

In the CyLab Distinguished Alumni Award's seventh year, Kissner joins 2025 winner Serge Egelman, 2024 winner Alina Oprea, 2023 winner Aaron Roth, 2022 winner Michelle Mazurek, 2021 winner Yinglian Xie, and 2020 winner Elaine Shi.

Kissner will be presented with the award and give a presentation entitled “From Silicon to Signals: Driving Full-Stack Security Through Incentive Engineering” at CyLab's annual Partners Conference on October 21, 2026.