40 Under 40 - 2025

Aparna Achanta’s career at IBM has allowed her to work on mission-critical projects for federal agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the Veterans Affairs Department.

Her expertise lies in securing important healthcare applications and sensitive health data for the VA and FDA. She implemented the "Zero Trust" framework at the agencies, which involved performance monitoring to ensure healthcare cloud applications are equipped with strong security measures. She also designed digital transformation projects for other large healthcare clients, speeding up the time it took healthcare applications to get to market.

Aparna spearheaded a center of excellence for software as a service applications, providing healthcare professionals such as pharmacists and physicians with tools and security and governance frameworks to develop their own applications. She said they can share the tools with their staff to modernize and streamline processes for their divisions.

“Some of the healthcare apps I worked on serve thousands of veterans and help them in getting healthcare via the right channels and at the right time,” she said. “Our center of excellence at the [VA] equips numerous citizen developers with no software development background with low-code tools that enable them to build applications by themselves based on their unique need and requirement.”

Achanta is also an important part of IBM’s Generative AI Center of Excellence, which creates guidelines for Microsoft CoPilot and WatsonX governance.

— Lauren Dubinsky