Lauren Wu
Certified international privacy professional / United States
Mic Drop Academy graduate
Lauren Wu, Esq., CIPP/US, is a keynote speaker, attorney, and former healthcare privacy executive. For more than a decade, Lauren held senior leadership roles at healthcare and life sciences companies, including Evidation Health, Roche, and Exact Sciences. Her work focused on privacy, regulation, and ethical decision-making, often behind the scenes, where policies, timelines, and incentives quietly shape who bears the cost of success.
Two years ago, Lauren experienced a significant health event that required her to step away from her executive career. What followed was not just recovery, but a reckoning. She began to see how many of the systems we call efficient or high-performing depend on people pushing past their limits, and how often that strain is framed as personal failure rather than a design flaw.
Today, Lauren speaks about rethinking power: not as endurance, control, or constant output, but as the ability to design systems that allow people to stay whole. Drawing from lived experience, Lauren invites audiences to reconsider what strength looks like when empathy and authenticity are treated like assets, not liabilities.
Lauren is a writer and speaker on leadership, ethics, and technology, the author of a forthcoming book on leadership (2026) and a children’s book on privacy and digital literacy (2027), a board member of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) and Advisory Board member of Grateful Giving, and adjunct instructor at Northwestern University School of Law.
Summit Session
Navigating Workplace Politics Without Losing Yourself
Session type: Session
Track: Careers
Time: 4:10 pm EST
Duration: 30 minutes
Description: Most leaders have been told that workplace politics is something you either have a talent for or do not. Read the room. Manage your image. Pick your moments. The advice assumes the problem is you. It usually is not.
Most of what gets called politics is misalignment: unclear expectations, competing incentives, and decision pressure nobody has named out loud. Those three forces feel personal when you are inside them. They are not. They are structural, and structural problems do not respond to personality adjustments.
This session gives you a different read on the room, and two tools you can use the same week you learn them. The Alignment Check is a three-question scan you run in the moment, before you react, to see what is actually happening underneath the tension. The Response Framework is a three-move sentence structure you use when you have to open your mouth and the stakes are real.
Lauren Wu spent two decades as a privacy and technology attorney in rooms with regulators, engineers, lab directors, and executives, where the decisions made affected whether people were safe. She learned this the hard way: She edited herself for years and watched the outcome stay exactly the same. She will tell you what that cost, what it cost her organization, and what she does now instead.
The session is built for those who are tired of choosing between being effective and being themselves. You will leave with language you can use in your next difficult conversation, and a clearer sense of what you are actually up against.
This is not a session about being more strategic, more armored, or more palatable. It is a session about seeing the system clearly and responding with consistency.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
