Christian "Chris" Schreiber

Chris Schreiber is a cybersecurity strategist with nearly 30 years of experience helping colleges and universities build defensible information security programs. He is the founder of CampusCISO®, a higher education advisory practice that he's operated as a solopreneur since 2021. He is also the creator of the Cyber Heat Map® capability assessment framework and the founder of the Cyber Bridge® peer community for education technology leaders.

Chris treats security planning as a structural discipline rather than a compliance exercise. He uses artificial intelligence to eliminate the manual, labor-intensive friction of data collection and correlation. By stripping out the mechanical busywork that typically inflates consulting engagements, he focuses entirely on high-value architecture. He reviews capability data through the lens of nearly 30 years of hands-on experience, delivering deep, defensible expertise at a fraction of the traditional cost. His work is grounded in concrete reality, drawing on structured data from more than 200 institutional capability assessments and IT policy reviews from over 400 institutions.

He learned to navigate the friction of decentralized governance by living it. Before launching his own practice, Chris served as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at the University of Chicago, the University of Arizona, and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He also translated institutional needs into product realities inside vendor organizations, including FireEye/Mandiant (now part of Google Cloud) and SunGard Higher Education (now Ellucian). Today, he continues to guide the sector through advisory engagements with institutions and by serving on the Advisory Board of the George Mason University Cyber Resilience Center.

In his writing, Chris translates complex technical concepts into plain-spoken strategies. He writes extensively about cybersecurity governance, IT policy, and building pragmatic strategies for cyber resilience using portfolio approaches to prioritize improvements.

A regular speaker at EDUCAUSE and other higher education conferences, Chris holds a Master's Certificate in Project Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.S. in Business Administration from Central Michigan University.