Dr. Sarah Lewis Cortes, CIPP/E (GDPR), CISA, CRISC is in Privacy Engineering and Assurance at Netflix, with responsibility for implements comprehensive privacy programs. She earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied Forensic Sciences at Boston University Medical School, and holds a PhD in Computer Science, Cybersecurity from Northeastern University, specializing in the Darknet, Privacy and Privacy Law as well as IT Security, topics on which she has published extensively. She conducts training and research with the FBI, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Digital Forensics Crime Lab, and other LEAs. She has implemented and overseen major security and privacy programs and operations in regulated industries, achieving compliance in SOC2, SOX, PCI and GDPR, and other laws and regulation and IT control frameworks.
Prior to undertaking her PhD, Sarah was Senior Vice President for Security, IT Audit and Disaster Recovery at Putnam Investments, an investment management firm with over $400 billion in assets under management, 79 mutual funds, 96 institutional clients, and over seven million shareholders and retirement plan participants. She oversaw Putnam’s recovery on 9/11 when then-parent company Marsh & McLennan’s World Trade Center 99th floor data center was destroyed. She also supervised over and 65 compliance and IT audits per year as well as incident investigations. As a senior executive and later consultant for Putnam and other Fortune 500 firms, Sarah also had responsibility for major applications development, data center and other operations, with over 100+ staff and $50m budgets. Before that, Sarah was a Sr. VP for Data Center and Security Operations and Compliance with BNY Mellon Bank, a global investments company with $1.6 trillion in assets under management, previously a part of Shearson/Lehman/American Express, the giant financial services conglomerate.
A former analyst for the US Department of Energy, she led the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Working Group sub-team, as co-author of the 2014 NIST: Guidelines for Smart Grid Cyber Security: Vol. 2, Privacy and the Smart Grid, as well as the 2010 volume, that created the security and privacy laws section of the report. She served on the privacy use cases team for two years and the NIST cybersecurity working group (CSWG) on Smart Grid privacy for seven years. She has co-led Northeastern University Law School Legal Skills in Social Context (LSSC) clinics on surveillance law and online privacy tools and technology, as well as an MIT Co-Design Studio class at MIT Media Lab. She has helped draft data breach laws, and testified before the Massachusetts legislature and regulatory agencies.
In addition to her work on various industry standards bodies, Sarah serves on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) P1912 Privacy and Security Architecture for Consumer Wireless Devices Working Group. Sarah serves as a postdoctoral researcher in Digital & Multimedia evidence at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab in Digital and Multimedia Evidence, and trains law enforcement in forensic techniques. In her work to help end cyberstalking and abuse through technology, Sarah serves on the Boards of Emerge, the first Abuser Intervention Program (BIP), and Each One Teach One, dedicated to training for technology employment.