By: Yale School of Nursing
Before Lars Gjerde ever placed a central line or led a hospital team, he was making his living at the keyboard. A classical musician with four degrees culminating in a doctorate, Lars spent years as a church musician and music director in New Haven before nursing called him to a second act at 35. He still answers that first calling every Sunday at the organ. But the impulse beneath both careers, he’ll tell you, is the same: a humanitarian pull to bring people together and make things better.
Today that drive powers a sweeping role at UC Davis Medical Center, where Lars serves as Advanced Practice Provider (APP) Manager, overseeing advanced practice providers across a dozen clinical specialties in adult inpatient services. He leads three supervisors and helps shape how care is delivered at scale, yet he still keeps one foot at the bedside, seeing patients one day a week on trauma, orthopedics, or in the intensive care unit.
“His aim is to make change not one patient at a time, but across the whole system.”
His path there was anything but typical. As a new graduate of Yale’s graduate-entry program, Lars applied to dozens of California jobs before his breakthrough: acceptance as UC Davis’s inaugural Trauma NP Fellow in 2019, a mentored bridge through trauma, surgical and neurocritical care, orthopedics, neurosurgery, and burns. From there he rose quickly, joining a surgical float team as a first-generation member, earning a promotion to supervisor, and building an entirely new APP team for hospital medicine at the tail end of COVID.
He credits much of that momentum to his Chief of Advanced Practice, Christi Delemos, who hired him, promoted him twice, and challenged him to pursue the MBA in Healthcare Business Analytics that he completed this past December.
What Yale gave him, Lars says, was more than clinical skill. He developed the habit of thinking like a leader, and driving systems improvement became second nature. That mindset now reaches far beyond one hospital. As President-Elect of the California Association for Nurse Practitioners, he is beginning a six-year presidential cycle representing the interests of 46,000 nurse practitioners statewide, having risen from communications chair to chapter president to state education chair.
The challenges he cares about most are access and equity. At a state university hospital serving largely underserved patients, he sees daily why maximizing nurse practitioner scope and practice matters so much.
Looking ahead, Lars remains focused on expanding the impact of nurse practitioners both within healthcare organizations and across the profession. Through his leadership at UC Davis and his advocacy work statewide, he is helping shape policies and systems that improve care for patients while creating opportunities for future generations of advanced practice providers.
For new graduates, his advice is consistent: build a strong foundation but stay open to the unexpected turns a career can take.
“Engage with people, find mentors, get involved in professional organizations. That's really how the exciting things happen.”
Connect with Lars
Are you an alum interested in acute care, nurse practitioner leadership, or shaping healthcare policy? Connect with Lars on LinkedIn or reach out via email at lgjerde@health.ucdavis.edu.