Harvard Medical School Chief Financial Officer Julie A. Joncas will serve as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ next chief financial officer, the school announced Wednesday, stepping into the role as FAS begins implementing a large-scale staff restructuring.
Joncas, who held a variety of roles in health care finance before spending four years managing HMS’s nearly $1 billion budget, replaces former FAS CFO Kofi N. Ofori, who left for Towson University more than two months ago.
She joins FAS as it begins one of its largest administrative reshufflings in decades, with layoffs set to begin next week. Joncas will work alongside FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra and Dean of Administration and Finance Warren Petrofsky — who is also relatively new to Harvard —as the school seeks to close a $365 million budget deficit in the coming years.
Her own finance office will likely see changes in the coming weeks as FAS works to centralize administrative functions such as finance and human resources under a “federated” model.
Joncas, a Harvard Business School graduate, arrived at Harvard after spending roughly two decades overseeing finances at Massachusetts health care institutions, including Mass General Brigham — the state’s largest private employer — and Tenet Healthcare.
As CFO of HMS, she managed a school that was already struggling to overcome a deficit even before the Trump administration’s sweeping federal funding cuts began.
At a grim town hall last spring, Joncas said the vast majority of the school’s research was federally funded and that HMS had only $39 million in reserves — a situation worsened by donor pullbacks over Harvard’s slow-walked response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Petrofsky wrote in his announcement of Joncas’ appointment that she had also served on “university-wide financial initiatives and committees.” Joncas served on the Board of Overseers for the Harvard/MIT M.D.-Ph.D. program and the committee overseeing HMS initiatives, programs, centers, and institutes.
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She will now help guide an administrative overhaul that could reduce FAS’s staff by as much as 25 percent.
Under the new structure, unveiled during town halls last month, FAS departments and centers will be clustered into administrative groups that share finance, human resources, and other functions.
Within Harvard College, major undergraduate services will be grouped into larger offices, including a new Office of the Secretary of the College and a revived Freshman Dean’s Office. Staff will also be expected to work in person five days a week while classes are in session.
In the announcement, Petrofsky praised Joncas for “combining rigorous financial stewardship with thoughtful, collaborative leadership.”
“I am delighted that she has accepted this role and look forward to partnering with her in the years ahead,” he added.
—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.
—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.
