New CFO (Interim) Appointment

From an email circulated today:

Dear Bruin Community:

Following up on my recent message about the departure of Gregg Goldman, I am pleased to announce that Allison Baird-James, currently UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of business and finance solutions, has agreed to serve as our interim vice chancellor and chief financial officer. She will take up the position on April 4.  

Since joining UCLA in 2010, Allison has proven to be an extremely capable and versatile leader. As associate vice chancellor, she has been responsible for our campus’s financial management and reporting, as well as the many and varied functions within the business and finance solutions office. Among other accomplishments, she created the treasury function at UCLA, diversifying our revenues and generating over $1 billion in new unrestricted revenue from investments over the past decade. She has also led cross-organizational teams to continually improve financial services, and established and is chair of the Busting Bureaucracy Working Group, designed to bring greater efficiency and focus to our operations.  

Allison has spent much of her career working in higher education. Prior to UCLA, she served for nearly 14 years at Stanford University in the roles of interim controller, associate controller and associate director of internal audit. Before Stanford, she worked in the finance divisions of several medical institutions. She started her career in accounting at PricewaterhouseCoopers and earned her Certified Public Accountant certification.

Allison holds a B.S. degree in business administration from California State University, Chico. In addition, she is a graduate of UCLA Anderson’s executive program in management and women in governance program as well as Stanford’s leadership program. She is a fellow of the National Association of College and University Business Officers and serves as co-treasurer and a board member of the Organization of Women Executives.   

I deeply appreciate Allison’s willingness to serve as interim vice chancellor and chief financial officer during this time of transition. In the future, we will launch a national search for the next permanent head of the division — but in the meantime, given Allison’s long record of success, I have full confidence in her ability to keep UCLA on firm financial footing and to advance her division’s critical work and initiatives. 

Sincerely,

Gene D. Block, Chancellor