Diana Burnett
Diana A. Burnett, Ph.D., MPH is currently an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow and Senior Policy Fellow with the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, which is one of two organizations that supports the Poor People’s Campaign. In this role, Diana supports the policy work of the Center and the Campaign specifically focused on the intersection of poverty, human rights, and health.
Burnett is a medical anthropologist whose work broadly focuses on the complex relationship between race and racism, identity formation, belief, religion, and spirituality, racial health disparities, and inequities in health. Diana has spent over fifteen years working with marginalized and disenfranchised communities both domestically and globally among issues of health and wellbeing, structural racism, and social justice. Burnett has conducted mixed methods research with communities which is being utilized and translated to create reports, briefings, articles, and other resources for justice.
As an interdisciplinary scholar working between race and ethnic studies, public health, and anthropology, Dr. Burnett has designed, implemented, and executed several national and international research projects. Burnett’s doctoral research investigated questions of identity, specifically Black Indigeneity, and well-being in a transnational spiritual community. In Brazil, Dr. Burnett worked on projects at the intersection of racial health disparities and religious activism and the impact of nutrition change on the health on Black women. Previously, Diana worked for years with several community academic partnerships on a number of community-based participatory research projects around different issues such as racial health disparities, health promotion, chronic disease prevention, mental health, and other social determinants of health. Diana was also a graduate intern at the National Institutes of Health who worked with the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.
Prior to the position as an ACLS fellow with the Kairos Center, Dr. Burnett was a researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Similarly, Diana was a trainee with the Global Alliance for Training in Health Equity Research partnered with Observatory for Urban Health in Belo Horizonte, School of Medicine at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. Dr. Burnett spent two years in Africana Studies at Smith College, where Diana conducted research and taught and designed courses. Diana has also held positions as a Visiting Research Fellow at Howard University, the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil.
Diana earned a Ph.D. focused on Medical Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania where Burnett also concurrently pursued a Master of Public Health. Prior to this, Dr. Burnett earned a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School and a B.A. from Hampton University.