Lourdes M. Turrecha is Privacy Tech & Law Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Privacy Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. She is a privacy, cybersecurity, and data protection strategist, lawyer, and leader, with 10+ years of combined experience in the areas of privacy, law, security, policy, and compliance.

Lourdes is the Founder & CEO of PIX LLC, an innovative privacy firm in Silicon Valley, and the Founder and Chief Privacy Tech Evangelist of The Rise of Privacy Tech, a movement that brings together privacy innovators, investors, experts, and evangelists to further privacy innovation. She is one of the first privacy professionals designated a Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) and is a certified information privacy professional on EU privacy, US privacy, privacy technologies, and program management (CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPT, and CIPM).

Prior to starting PIX & TROPT, Lourdes worked in Silicon Valley for the enterprise cybersecurity leader, Palo Alto Networks, whose mission is to protect our digital way of life from cyberattacks. While there, she developed her own work mission of ensuring that privacy is weaved into their products and operations, working cross-functionally with engineering, information security, product management, and other teams in the company.

Lourdes also worked in Big Law, advising a client portfolio that included 100+ tech companies, start-ups, and global organizations on their data protection obligations including GDPR, Privacy Shield, BCRs, HIPAA, etc. and managing her clients; incident and data breach response, including some of the biggest ransomware attacks, WannaCry and NotPetya.

Early on in her privacy career, Lourdes was a founding member of a Fortune 300 company’s privacy office, where she served as the company’s second highest ranking privacy official and helped design and build its privacy program from the group up. She worked with leading privacy thought leader, Prof. Daniel J. Solove, consulted for TeachPrivacy LLC, worked in-house at Abt Associates Inc., and began her legal career at boutique law firms in Washington, DC.

Lourdes earned her legal degree from The George Washington University Law School and her bachelor’s degrees in Government & International Politics and in Legal Studies from George Mason University. She was also a visiting honors student at the University of Oxford, where she studied Western Political Theory and Comparative US, EU, & UK Law.