Westinghouse Chief Technology Officer Garners Women in Energy Leadership Award

Cynthia Pezze, chief technology officer of Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC, has been honored by Pittsburgh Business Times with a Women in Energy Leadership award. This is the first year for the award program, which was created to honor women leaders in the region's energy sector, including Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

As chief technology officer, Pezze is responsible for overseeing development of innovative technologies that create customer success and further solidify Westinghouse’s position as a global technology leader. This includes, most recently, proposed collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on an innovative Westinghouse lead-cooled fast reactor that will be designed to achieve new levels of energy affordability, safety and flexibility.

Mark Marano, president, Westinghouse Americas Region said, “Our customers look to Westinghouse for innovative solutions. Cindy leads the team that ensures that we identify the very best ideas – internally through comprehensive evaluation against defined criteria and externally, through collaboration with national and international laboratories, universities and industry – and develop those ideas into innovative technologies that ultimately help our customers reach their goals.”

In addition to driving technology development through innovation, Pezze is responsible for ensuring a robust career path for Westinghouse’s global workforce of technical leaders. Mentoring is a core competency for all Westinghouse’s technical leaders, and Pezze is a powerful advocate and active participant. At a recent meeting of the company’s top leadership team, Pezze was lauded with the Westinghouse Talent Management award for her role in promoting and engaging in mentoring relationships.

“Everyone should mentor, either formally or informally,” Pezze noted. “My personal experiences, derived from 30 years with Westinghouse in a variety of engineering and manufacturing roles, are useful only if I can share them with others. If I would have one legacy in my career, it would be that I helped many men and women succeed, and that mentoring has been an important factor.”

Pezze serves on boards for the University of Pittsburgh Center for Energy, Duquesne University undergraduate business program and University of California Berkeley nuclear program. She is an active member of Women in Nuclear, the Society of Women Engineers and the ASME Industry Advisory Group, as well as executive sponsor for the Westinghouse Science Honors Institute.

Pezze holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics from Allegheny College and metallurgical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. She has completed executive management programs at Duquesne University’s Beard Institute and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She works at the company’s headquarters site in Cranberry Township, Pa.

Westinghouse Electric Company, a group company of Toshiba Corporation (TKY:6502), is the world's pioneering nuclear energy company and is a leading supplier of nuclear plant products and technologies to utilities throughout the world. Westinghouse supplied the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor in 1957 in Shippingport, Pa., U.S. Today, Westinghouse technology is the basis for approximately one-half of the world's operating nuclear plants, including more than 50 percent of those in Europe.

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