Career profile
Shefali Mookencherry
Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer, University of Illinois Chicago
- Current role, per sources checked 3 November 2025
- 23 January 2023
Shefali Mookencherry is the Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer of the University of Illinois Chicago, appointed in January 2023.
Career path
She spent more than eleven years as director of managed care operations at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Hospital of Chicago.
She later worked as a consultant for Hayes Management Consulting and Encore Health Resources, and spent three years with Impact Advisors.
In 2020 she became Chief Information Security Officer at Edward-Elmhurst Health, a position she held until taking on her responsibilities at UIC.
At UIC she was announced as Chief Information Security Officer, responsible for the university's information security and privacy strategy, policy and the protection of its information assets.
She now holds the combined title of Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer.
Scope of the role
Her responsibilities span academics, research and healthcare security across an institution with close to 34,000 students, 13,000 employees and a medical center recording more than 550,000 visits a year. The work includes coordination with federal agencies and oversight that extends across the university's international activities, with security requests arriving outside normal working hours. She has described the shift between public- and private-sector budgeting as a central adjustment, noting that public funding requires detailed annual justification rather than a fixed allocation.
Recognition and public appearances
In 2025 she was named the Enterprise Chicago CISO of the Year by the Chicago CISO of the Year Program, following a multi-stage evaluation that included written applications, peer interviews and reviews by local chief executives. "I'm proud to be part of this CISO community," Mookencherry says. She was also named a finalist in the Large Enterprise category of the 2025 ChicagoCISO ORBIE Awards, an honor supported by Crain's Chicago Business. She appeared on a panel at the IEEE Chicago Section's Global Cyber Security Initiative conference on critical infrastructure, OT and manufacturing, held November 17, 2025, alongside security leaders from the City of Chicago, Northern Trust and CME.
