About the IAPP

Michelle Finneran Dennedy is Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco, where she works to raise awareness and create tools that promote privacy, quality, respect, trust, and asset-level possibilities for data. She is a unique visionary in the field of privacy and the IT industry, bringing together multifaceted approaches that provide sincere privacy protections and drive business value.

Throughout her career, Dennedy has led security and privacy initiatives, ranging from regulatory compliance, privacy engineering, advocacy and education efforts, and litigation at companies including Cisco, and previously McAfee/Intel Security, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. She foundedThe iDennedy Project, which seeks to change how people think about information and data, and co-authored The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto: Getting from Policy to Code to QA to Value.

Dennedy is a highly sought-after public speaker who sits on the boards of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society of Northern California. She has been honored with many industry awards including California’s Most Powerful and Influential Women, by the National Diversity Council; the IAPP Vanguard Award; Woman of Influence for Security and Privacy, from the Executive Women’s Forum (EWF) and CSO Magazine; Woman of the Year in Technology and Transformation, by the Stevie American Business Awards, and most recently, World Women Awards Silver Winner for Female Executive of the Year for her leadership in optimizing Cisco’s privacy maturity.

Dennedy has a Doctorate of Law degree from Fordham University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Clinical, Counseling and Applied Psychology and Economics from The Ohio State University.