Headshot of Cynthia M. Patton, Board Member

Cynthia M. Patton, JD

General Counsel and Secretary, Tessera

Cynthia serves as General Counsel and Secretary of Tessera. She brings over 20 years of leadership experience in corporate legal affairs in the biotech and healthcare industries.

Before Tessera, Cynthia served as the General Counsel and Secretary at Verily Life Sciences, where she had responsibility for all transactional, employment, IP, governance, litigation, privacy, compliance and government affairs matters. Previously, she served as Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer at Amgen, where she was responsible for Amgen’s global privacy, trade compliance and healthcare compliance organizations, including providing oversight of the EH&S, quality, corporate security, regulatory and manufacturing compliance functions. She also served as board chair of the Amgen Foundation. Prior to Amgen, she served as General Counsel of SCAN Health Plan. Cynthia began her career working in law firms specializing in corporate, health and securities law.

She has been honored with the 2019 ECI Carol R. Marshall Award for Innovation in Corporate Ethics as well as recognized by BlackDoctor.org and The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health as one of the 2019 Top Blacks in Healthcare. She was named one of 2018’s and 2022’s Most Influential Black Lawyers by Savoy Magazine and honored by the Black Women Lawyers Association of L.A. with the Corporate Excellence Award in 2018.

Cynthia received her J.D. degree from George Washington University and her B.S. degree from Vassar College. Cynthia currently serves as a board member for Organon, Inc., the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles and Vassar College.