Caitlin Zulla had just received Princeton’s Sportswoman of the Year award when a classmate told her she was awesome. Her answer was rather less ceremonial: “I just fence.” It was an economical acceptance speech for someone whose college record included three All-America selections. There were surprise, tears, congratulations, and then that small act of deflation. The trophy had arrived. The ego appeared to be running late.
Today, Zulla is chief executive and a director of Lumexa Imaging. She has led SCA Health, run Optum Health East, and joined the board of National Vision. The jobs have grown larger, the organizational charts more crowded. Yet the interesting question in her career is the same one that hangs over any team sport: how much can one person accomplish by getting other people to work well together?
Her own answer starts at Princeton. She has explicitly credited the fencing team with teaching her how to build successful teams and improve performance. It is an unusually concrete explanation for a leadership philosophy. Before the board seats and earnings calls, there was a captain, a weapon, and a group of teammates with a shared score.
A captain before a chief executive
At Princeton, she competed as Caitlin Rich, class of 1999. She earned first-team All-Ivy recognition in women’s épée in 1996, 1997, and 1999. The spacing matters. This was achievement sustained across a college career, rather than one good afternoon preserved forever in a trophy cabinet. She also served as a captain for three seasons.
Her sophomore dual-meet record was 60 wins and six losses. Across her college career, the total reached 149 wins and 24 losses. Those numbers make the modest reply to her classmate funnier. “I just fence” was doing quite a lot of work. The award was the Otto von Kienbusch Sportswoman of the Year honor, and she became the first fencer to receive it.
Individual results. A team education.
In 1999, Princeton’s women won their first Ivy League fencing championship. Rich and Maya Lawrence contributed to that breakthrough season. The women also finished second at the Intercollegiate Fencing Association championships, while Princeton’s combined men’s and women’s program took its first five-weapon title. The individual accomplishments belonged inside a larger result.
That distinction helps explain why the college years remain useful to her story. A captain can contribute points personally and still need everyone else. The record book keeps both kinds of achievement close together: the athlete’s name and the institution’s first championship. Years later, when Zulla talks about teams, there is an actual team behind the word.
The education that wandered outdoors
Zulla studied ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. Her junior spring and summer included study with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Kenya. The geographical range is striking beside the tidy progression of degrees in an executive biography. There were places to go and subjects to investigate well beyond the fencing strip.
She graduated in 1999 and earned her Columbia master’s degree in 2001. She later completed another master’s at Dartmouth. The sequence gives her career a combination of scientific study, organizational training, and continued education while working. There is no need to supply a childhood prophecy to make the route coherent. The decisions themselves are interesting enough.
Before SCA, she held a senior operations role at MedAssets. Her background included the revenue cycle, the complicated work of turning services into payments. It is a useful place to learn how organizations actually function: responsibility passes between teams, and the cost of a missed handoff eventually becomes visible in the numbers.
Learning the organization from the inside
Zulla joined SCA in 2015. Her responsibilities grew through senior leadership, administration, and finance before her appointment as CEO in December 2019. She had worked within the organization before being asked to lead it. That gave her a different starting point from an incoming executive armed principally with a new title and an introductory slide deck.
The formal progression included chief administrative officer in 2017 and combined chief financial officer and chief administrative officer responsibilities in 2018 and 2019. Administration and finance require attention to the connections between departments. A decision that looks elegant in one column can become rather less elegant by the time it reaches the next team.
When her CEO appointment was announced, Wyatt Decker pointed to her advocacy for SCA within the wider organization. The announcement also described her early work improving revenue-cycle operations and building teams. Her advancement was tied to a recognizable set of operating responsibilities. The captain had acquired a balance sheet.
“When we are diverse, we are stronger.”
Caitlin Zulla · 2020
In an early interview as CEO, she explained that SCA’s culture had helped attract her to the company. She supported its diversity, inclusion, and belonging work and its teammate resource groups. These are revealing priorities for someone coming from finance. She was willing to discuss the social structure of the workplace alongside the business’s investment plans.
By 2022, her explanation of management had become particularly practical. SCA had clarified its brand, reduced the number of competing priorities, and emphasized clear ownership of decisions. She described a process organized around a few tangible priorities. It is the sort of work that rarely earns a photograph, although anyone who has survived a meeting about who owns the next meeting may appreciate its value.
- Clarify the directionGive the organization a shared understanding of where it is going.
- Choose the prioritiesFocus attention on tangible work that drives performance.
- Make ownership clearHelp people understand who decides and who delivers.
A larger map, then a new company
In March 2023, Zulla became CEO of Optum Health East. The role covered ten states, extending from Maine to Delaware. It broadened the geographical and organizational scale of her responsibilities after her years at SCA. Her work now involved coordinating across a region rather than leading the organization where she had risen through several functions.
National Vision added her to its board in August 2024 and placed her on the compensation committee. Its appointment announcement emphasized her financial background alongside her executive experience. A board seat brings another vantage point: helping oversee a company while its management team runs the daily operation. Her career was beginning to encompass both sides of that relationship.
Then came another change. In January 2025, US Radiology Specialists announced Zulla as its new CEO. Lee Cooper, her predecessor, returned to the chair’s role. The arrangement gave the incoming chief executive an experienced counterpart on the board. She was taking responsibility for an established national business, with more than 5,000 team members at the time of the announcement.
Her stated opening priorities were listening, aligning, and advancing. The order deserves attention. Listening came before the promise of innovation. Her emphasis was on understanding the organization through the people doing the work, then connecting strategy and resources, then moving forward. It is a sequence that leaves room for the possibility that an incoming CEO has something to learn.
A new name gets its market debut
In July 2025, US Radiology Specialists became Lumexa Imaging. Zulla described the name as an expression of the company’s future direction and partnerships. She had already led SCA through a period in which its brand evolved alongside its business. At Lumexa, she again faced the task of helping a growing organization explain itself.
The expansion plan had four parts: improve performance at existing locations, open new ones, form partnerships, and pursue selected acquisitions. Those routes place different demands on a management team. Improving an existing operation calls for detailed attention; opening a location requires execution from the ground up; a partnership adds another organization’s interests to the conversation.
On December 11, 2025, she rang Nasdaq’s opening bell in Times Square. The photograph captures a smile, a greeting, and colleagues applauding around her. An exchange ceremony gives the public a compact picture of work spread over months. For a morning, an organization fits on a stage.
The company’s initial public offering closed the next day at $18.50 per share. Going public added a new audience for management’s decisions, along with the regular discipline of reporting results. A business that had changed its name during the year now had a stock symbol, LMRI, and investors waiting to hear what happened next.
The discipline of following through
During 2025, Lumexa opened nine new centers. In its August 2026 update, the company announced four new centers for the year to date and its ninth system partnership. The numbers belong to distinct reporting periods. Together, they show the practical assignments beneath the expansion language: locations to establish, relationships to manage, and teams to support.
Zulla also took part in a September 2026 discussion about scaling companies with Scott Becker and other business leaders. Her contribution returned to a familiar problem: an executive who remains personally involved in every decision can eventually restrict the organization’s progress. Growing the company requires growing other leaders and building dependable ways to make decisions.
Her emphasis on doing what one says one will do offers a useful ending to the story. It is a standard colleagues can test without waiting for an annual report. The college captain’s record was counted bout by bout. An executive’s credibility accumulates through promises kept, responsibilities understood, and people trusted to carry the work forward.
Outside work, Zulla has said she and her husband Mike enjoy travel and time with friends and family. She is also a devoted Peloton user. The former competitor still has somewhere to put that energy. The setting has changed considerably since Princeton. Her account of what makes a team work remains close to where she started.