Laura Kavanagh

Laura served as the 34th New York City Fire Commissioner, overseeing the nation’s largest fire department—with 17,000 employees, a $2.3 billion budget, and 1.6 million annual 911 calls. She was the first woman to lead the historically male-dominated department and the youngest commissioner in more than a century. She was tasked with making the agency more efficient and effective while leading it through some of New York City’s most challenging moments, including a global pandemic, fiscal crises, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.

Laura has spent nearly two decades in public services, first as a public affairs consultant on local, congressional, mayoral, and presidential campaigns, then as a senior advisor in the Mayor’s Office, and for nearly a decade at the FDNY before becoming Commissioner. She has worked on some of the most complex public policy issues, from universal pre-K implementation and congestion pricing to homelessness and mental health responses, and has been cited as an expert on government efficiency, public health, workplace discrimination, robotics, drones, and disaster response and recovery.

Laura has built a reputation as someone unafraid to take on the toughest, most intractable problems and to find ways to solve them.

She has appeared on NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX, and has been featured in Fortune, Crain’s New York Business, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, and The New York Times.

Laura received her B.A. from Whittier College and her M.P.A. from Columbia University, where she wrote about gossip in the workplace. She also holds certificates from Stanford University and the Naval Postgraduate Center for Homeland Security. She is currently a keynote speaker and writer on leadership, transformation, and resiliency.