Dr. Alissa Abdullah (Dr. Jay)
Deputy Chief Security Officer

Alissa “Dr. Jay” Abdullah is Mastercard’s deputy chief security officer. In this role she leads the
Emerging Corporate Security Solutions team and is responsible for protecting Mastercard’s
information assets as well as driving the future of security.

Dr. Jay joined Mastercard in 2019 after serving as the chief information security officer of Xerox
where she established and led a corporate-wide information risk management program. She also
served as the deputy chief information officer of the White House where she helped modernize
the Executive Office of the President’s IT systems with cloud services and virtualization.
She currently hosts Cybercrime Magazine’s Mastering Cyber and CISO 500 podcasts. Dr. Jay is
a member of the Security Magazine’s Women in Security Advisory Group and Smartsheet’s
Board of Directors. She also serves as vice chair of BITS, the technology policy division of the
Bank Policy Institute (BPI).

Dr. Jay holds a PhD in Information Technology Management from Capella University, a master’s
degree in Telecommunications and Computer Networks from The George Washington University
and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Savannah State University.