Dennis Leber

Dennis Leber is the chief information security officer of Erlanger Health System, appointed in February 2026.

Career path

Leber began his working life in the Marine Corps and afterward joined a police department. He moved into information security and served as interim chief information security officer at UConn Health, a roughly 300-bed hospital in the Connecticut-Hartford-Farmington area with a College of Medicine and College of Dentistry. He went on to serve as chief information security officer and chief technology officer, as well as assistant vice chancellor for Information Technology Services, at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
At UTHSC he also held the HIPAA security officer role and led the office's Security Preparedness and Response (SPAR) initiative. He has also worked in information security at Farmington, Conn.-based UConn Health, Memphis-based University of Tennessee Health Science Center and Elizabethtown, Ky.-based Hardin Memorial Health. Before joining Erlanger, Leber served as a cybersecurity solutions architect for legal services company Avalon. He was appointed chief information security officer of Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Erlanger Health System in February 2026.

Current remit

As Erlanger's CISO, Leber has directed his team toward platform-based consolidation to eliminate redundancy across the security and infrastructure stack. "We’re aggressively consolidating our security and infrastructure stack — prioritizing platform-based solutions, particularly within Microsoft, to reduce duplication, licensing and operational overhead," Leber said. He has pointed to rising labor costs, vendor spend and regulatory burden as forces reshaping Erlanger's technology roadmap.

Published work and recognition

While at UTHSC, Leber was named to the inaugural Top 100 CISOs (C100) listing by CISOs Connect, selected by a board of peer CISOs. He described cybersecurity as a lifestyle rather than only a profession and, in a Profiles in Leadership interview for Information Security Media Group's CyberEdBoard series, discussed what he called a buzzword mentality as among the biggest threats facing the field, alongside the challenge of managing people and maintaining work-life balance. In a healthsystemCIO podcast interview as UConn Health's interim CISO, he discussed the importance of translating cybersecurity risk into a chief executive's language rather than technical jargon. In that same interview he identified phishing, vishing and smishing as persistent attack vectors in healthcare and described creating his own SPAR, or Security Preparedness and Response, training method to prepare staff to recognize and respond to such threats. He also participated in a panel on creating a culture of cybersecurity to counter phishing campaigns, organized by healthsystemcio.com.