Cynthia Herrera-Lindstrom

Cynthia Herrera Lindstrom is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Executive Director of the Academic Computing and Communications Center (ACCC), a position she has held since 2012. She was also designated the University of Illinois HIPAA Privacy and Security Officer in April 2015. In her role she provides campus leadership in setting IT policy, guiding the future direction of campus IT, and overseeing the ACCC's budget and services.

Mrs. Herrera Lindstrom is an active leader at UIC and is a member of the University System IT Leadership Team; the Provost Management Team at UIC; the Chancellor’s and Vice Chancellors Committee, and the UIC IT Governance Council (ITGC) and its Administration, Education, Infrastructure and Security, and Research committees. In partnership with the UIC Library, she is working on creating a fifth ITGC committee to address data governance. She is chair of the UofI Information Privacy and Security Committee, which includes a university wide Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) subcommittee that she also chairs as the UofI HIPAA Privacy and Security Official.

The CIO has achieved many goals throughout her career, including reorganizing ACCC to better align its services, gain efficiencies, and improve customer service. She has introduced business process improvement, project management methodology, change management, and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to ACCC. She worked with the ITGC and the Provost’s Office to fund UIC’s first High Performance Computing Cluster. She led the effort in creating UIC’s first IT Strategic Plan. With the ITGC and the Vice Provost for Resource Planning and Budgeting, she has implementing a new funding model for ACCC that addresses the changing nature of the IT services provided today. She has also worked on improving IT services and support for researchers by creating the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Education and Research group.

In partnership with the ITGC, she has been leading an effort to implement an IT security program for several years, obtaining tools and setting up secure environments for researchers working with high risk data, conducting IT risk assessments.  As the HIPAA Privacy and Security Official, she has been working on providing more leadership as it relates to HIPAA compliance through policies, resources and support.

As the CIO, she also provides campus-wide strategic direction in all areas of emergency preparedness, continuity/risk management, and disaster recovery, which includes oversight of all critical academic, business, and research processes supported by technology. She served on the Kuali Foundation board for the Kuali Ready product, providing vision, energy, and leadership in developing and improving business continuity planning for higher education.

Prior to her CIO role, she held positions of increased responsibility in ACCC in her 34-year tenure at UIC, where she received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Math and Computer Science, and Economics. She also holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the College of Engineering, also earned at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, photography, gardening and attempts to play golf.