NuVasive Names New Chief Information Officer

San Diego, Calif.-based NuVasive has appointed Johnson Lai as chief information officer.

“We are pleased to announce the appointment of Johnson Lai as we look to enhance and scale our IT capabilities worldwide,” said Gregory T. Lucier, NuVasive’s chairman and CEO. “Bringing his extensive global IT leadership and medical technology experience to this newly created role, Johnson will help us execute our strategic goals, integrate systems and scale our business to deliver an outstanding customer experience that differentiates us in the market. As the complexities of our business increase, elevating the leadership role for IT to my leadership team ensures we are placing the strategic emphasis needed on our systems.”

The spine company recently has made a number of senior leadership changes.

Lai has more than 20 years of IT leadership experience and brings to the role extensive expertise in advancement of enterprise IT initiatives. Most recently, he was vice president of IT at Thermo Fisher Scientific where he was responsible for providing the IT leadership to the Laboratory Products business group, as well as being an executive member of the integration management team that governed the integration of Life Technologies into Thermo Fisher Scientific. In that capacity,  Lai was responsible for driving processes that created a combined IT vision and successfully executing global programs that achieved the targeted revenue and cost synergy objectives. Additionally, he provided IT leadership for Thermo Fisher Scientific’s corporate functions with a business centric approach, including the support of mergers and acquisitions, among other responsibilities. Previously, as a senior IT leader at Life Technologies, Lai was responsible for delivering critical IT projects, including a global enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-commerce and IT integration of companies acquired. Prior to that, Lai was a global IT leader for Abbott Vascular where he led the deployment of a single instance global ERP system and further matured the IT infrastructure and data centers to world-class levels. Lai has a bachelor’s degree in managerial economics from the University of California at Davis and a M.B.A with an emphasis from the University of California at Davis.