Currently serving as the Director of the UCLA MHA Program, the Director of the UCLA Center for Healthcare Management, and a Professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Dr. Laura Erskine brings extensive leadership experience to the Department of Health Policy and Management. Before stepping into her role with the MHA program, she spent nearly a decade as the Director of the UCLA MPH Program in Health Policy and Management, and her work centers on developing evidence-based, practice-ready leaders who can navigate the complexity of today’s healthcare environment.

She expanded the global health footprint of the department when she introduced a course that gives students the opportunity to attend the World Health Assembly in Geneva and she made changes to the MPH curriculum that enables students to deepen their expertise in an area of interest to them. Her scholarly writing has also had an impact on the educational program by increasing the use of case-based instruction in the classroom and developing new case studies.

Within the MHA curriculum, she developed the Organizational Behavior and Leadership courses and continues to lead the MHA capstone. Her teaching emphasizes real-world application through experiential activities, field-based cases, and simulations strengthening students’ decision-making and interpersonal effectiveness. She draws on her professional background in strategic consulting, entrepreneurship, and field-based research to connect management theory to organizational challenges.

In 2020, Dr. Erskine established an annual case competition through the Center for Healthcare Management at UCLA. This global event, sponsored by UCLA Health, challenges graduate students to provide actionable solutions for real-time management hurdles faced by the healthcare system. Following a November case release, the competition culminates in final presentations on the UCLA campus each January.

Since 2021, she has also directed the Paul Torrens Health Forum. This free, public program acts as a premier platform at UCLA, bringing together researchers, seasoned executives, and students to debate and discuss the most critical issues currently facing the public health sector.

Her academic foundation includes a PhD from the USC Marshall School of Business, where her research focused on leadership at a distance. She also holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University and a BA in History and Political Science from McGill University.

Her research interests include the meaning of relational distance in leader-follower relationships, leadership in virtual settings, classroom pedagogy and emergent leadership in the context of collective action. She has published her research in a variety of academic and practitioner journals and presented her research at several national and regional conferences.

Following her MBA studies, she worked as a management consultant for A.T. Kearney and in a variety of marketing and strategy roles at Disney Online and FirstLook.com. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr. Erskine participated in the creation of Eureka Review, a Los Angeles-based SAT tutoring company. Before joining UCLA in 2013, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Management and Quantitative Methods in the College of Business at Illinois State University.

As a dedicated leadership educator, she serves on the boards of the Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA) and the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. Additionally, as a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, she is deeply committed to helping MHA students identify and leverage their strengths to maximize their professional potential.