Laura Dannels Named Chief Human Resources Officer at UCSF
UC San Francisco has named Laura Dannels, PhD, MBA, as its next chief human resources officer. She will serve as Associate Vice Chancellor of Human Resources for UCSF and Senior Vice President of Human Resources for UCSF Health.
Dannels, who specializes in workforce development and helping organizations adapt to rapid change, has held leadership positions at Kaiser Permanente and was most recently chief talent officer for Wellstar Health System in Atlanta.
“Recruiting, supporting, and growing our people is essential to the success of our mission,” said Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS. “I’m excited to welcome Laura to UCSF and look forward to her leadership in helping everyone in our community thrive.”
She will start at UCSF on Dec. 15 and report to UCSF Health CEO Suresh Gunasekaran and Senior Vice Chancellor Erin Gore.
“Delivering world-class care starts with investing in people,” said UCSF Health CEO Gunasekaran. “Laura’s leadership will help us strengthen our culture, grow our talent, and make UCSF Health the best place to build a career — and to receive exceptional care.”
Dannels helped to prepare Wellstar as it grew from a $2 billion to an $8 billion organization in six years. This included using technology to expand executive coaching to the organization’s leaders, using AI to perform rote tasks so talent acquisition and onboarding staff could spend more time interacting one-on-one with workers, and implementing virtual reality training to scale up certain clinical and leadership capacities.
“I am impressed by the breadth of Laura’s experience both in thinking about how to support people within an organization and how to modernize systems,” Senior Vice Chancellor Gore said. “As we look to the future of implementing new technologies across UCSF, she will be a strong leader in balancing the changes with how they affect our employees.”
At Wellstar, Dannels worked with organizational leaders to lead the change management for a new enterprise resource planning program across finance, human resources, and supply chain. And she launched a career pathways program called CareerCare that prepared new workers for clinical and technology roles. Dannels also helped modernize Wellstar’s HR systems, utilizing automation and analytics, while paying close attention to how employees experienced the new technology.
“What excites me so much about UCSF is helping the organization transform on the human side,” Dannels said. “The need for health care workers continues to grow, and the only way we’ll have the caregivers, researchers, and health innovators of tomorrow is by developing and supporting them today — across our university and health system.”
At Wellstar, Dannels served on their venture advisory committee to look at human capital-focused start-ups, such as virtual reality to train workers. She serves as an HR Venture Advisor with SemperVirens Venture Capital and is certified through UC Berkeley as an executive coach.
A native of Northern California, Dannels’ family has Bay Area roots that go back generations, including several family members who were born at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland.
Dannels holds a PhD from Pepperdine University and an MBA from the University of Houston, and she serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia University in the graduate Human Capital Management program. Her work has been honored by Forbes, Fortune, the Obama Administration, and the Tony Hsieh Award for innovation in workforce transformation.