Luanna Putney is the Associate Chancellor & Chief of Staff to the Chancellor at UC Merced. As Chief of Staff, Luanna provides strategic leadership to the Chancellor and Cabinet in furtherance of the university mission, including development and execution of a wide variety of programs, policies and initiatives. Luanna also oversees Human Resources, the Ethics and Compliance Office, including Title IX/VII and the whistleblower program, Internal Audit, Risk Services and the Ombuds Office.
Prior to joining UC Merced, Luanna served as the Executive Director of Ethics and Compliance in the UC Office of Ethics, Compliance and Audit Services where she provided systemwide compliance oversight in research areas including contracts and grants, protection of human and animal research subjects, clinical research billing, research integrity, conflict of interest and export control. In this role, Luanna also provided systemwide compliance oversight in health sciences areas including billing and coding and privacy. Luanna began her UC career as an Intellectual Property Officer at UC Davis InnovationAccess where she was responsible for managing inventions related to medical therapeutics, devices and diagnostics in the School of Medicine and facilitating start-up companies.
While a graduate student at UC Davis in the School of Medicine, and subsequent NIH postdoctoral fellow at UC San Francisco in the School of Dentistry, Luanna was responsible for the design and conduct of complex research projects investigating the functions of specific plasma membrane ion transporter proteins.
