Biography

Dr Úna Cunningham Úna is the head of Mater Transformation, having established the office in 2013.

Úna’s area of special interest is collective leadership in teams. She completed her PhD as part of the Co-Lead programme https://www.ucd.ie/collectiveleadership/ at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2021. Through this approach, she has developed a reputation for enabling teams to work across silos and hierarchies—building trust, embracing positive conflict and instilling the accountability and ownership that is fundamental to real and lasting change.

As Executive Lead for Strategic Projects, Úna has most recently overseen the clinical, operational and people planning for the Rock Wing and Major Trauma Centre projects at the hospital.

Úna guest lectures on transformational systems level change and team interventions at UCD and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She is also a leadership mentor with the Irish Management Institute. Her work has been published in BMC Health Services Research, BMC Medical Research Methodology, BMC Medical Education, BMJ Open and the International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health.