Laura Dannels

Laura Dannels is Chief Human Resources Officer for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she leads enterprise people and organizational strategy across UCSF Health, its biomedical research enterprise, and the university campus, supporting a workforce of more than 50,000 across one of the nation’s premier academic health enterprises.

An enterprise transformation executive and organizational strategist with nearly two decades of experience, Laura has helped organizations navigate extraordinary growth, technological disruption, and complex change across healthcare, academia, biotechnology, energy, and the startup and venture ecosystem. Her work focuses on building the leadership, culture, talent, and organizational capabilities required to scale while preserving mission, innovation, and performance.

Throughout her career, Laura has built a reputation for modernizing HR functions to become more technology-enabled, AI-ready, and data-driven. She has led large-scale digital HR transformations and applied technology, automation, analytics, and AI across the employee lifecycle to improve organizational performance, strengthen decision-making, and create better experiences for employees and leaders.

Prior to UCSF, Laura held senior leadership roles at Wellstar Health System during its growth from approximately $2 billion to $8 billion. She helped build the leadership and organizational infrastructure required to support that expansion. Her pioneering work developing predictive talent pipelines to anticipate future workforce needs was recognized with the Tony Hsieh Award.

Laura also brings experience across the startup and venture ecosystem, advising founders and emerging companies on organizational scale, leadership, culture, talent, and AI. She serves as an advisor to SemperVirens Venture Capital and previously served on the Venture Committee for Catalyst by Wellstar, a $100 million healthcare innovation fund.

A frequent national speaker, Laura’s work has been recognized by Forbes, Fortune, Becker’s Healthcare, Great Place to Work, SHRM, DiversityInc, and the Obama Administration.

Laura holds a PhD focused on Change and Transformation from Pepperdine University, an MBA from the University of Houston, and is SHRM-SCP certified. She has completed executive education in Executive Coaching through UC Berkeley and Strategy & Human-Centered Design through Stanford.