Laura Wagner, PhD, RN, FAAN

Faculty
Healthforce Center at UCSF
Photo of Dr. Laura Wagner.

Dr. Laura M.Wagner is faculty at Healthforce Center at the University of California San Francisco. She is a professor in the Department of Community Health Systems at UCSF and faculty at UCSF’s Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care.

Dr. Wagner's research has focused on improving patient safety and quality improvement skills among nurses in geriatric care settings. As a result of this work, Dr. Wagner has directly participated on a national panel to develop a standard warning label for portable bedrails and led the development of an international best practice guideline for the use of restraint alternatives. In her role as a professor, Dr. Wagner precepts nurse practitioner students and has increased opportunities for students to engage in Bay Area geriatric clinical experiences.

Dr. Wagner was inducted as a 2013 fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and has received several national and international awards for her research including the Springer Award in Geriatric Nursing Research, the Western Institute of Nursing/American Nurses Foundation Scholar Award, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator in Aging Award. She was a 2013 UCSF Hellman Fellow and participated in the inaugural 2015-2016 UCSF Tideswell National Leadership Development Program. In 2017, Dr. Wagner founded the UCSF FirstGenRN program, a program that provides career development support to nursing students who are the first in their family to attend and graduate from college. She previously worked for New York University College of Nursing and The Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest in Toronto, Canada.

Dr. Wagner earned her doctoral degree in nursing from Emory University in 2004. She received training as a nationally certified Geriatric Nurse Practitioner from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, where she was a researcher alongside nurse scholars who transformed the practice of restraint-free care. She obtained her bachelor's of science in 1997 from Case Western Reserve University.

See Laura Wagner's UCSF profile and Google Scholar profile.