Bio
Kathy Burke is the Human and Planetary Health Lead at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, a Lecturer in the Doerr School for Sustainability and a Senior Advisor at the School of Medicine's Center for Innovation in Global Health. She is a co-instructor in BIO 103/203 Human and Planetary Health and SUSTAIN 140 Environmental Humanities. She works across campus advancing the field of human and planetary health, setting strategy, managing grants, and bringing new voices to campus.
In 2019-20 she was a Distinguished Career Institute Fellow, studying climate impacts on health.
From 2015-19, she served as Deputy Director of Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, where she co-created and led the inaugural Women Leaders in Global Health conference in 2017 and the international Planetary Health Alliance Annual Meeting in 2019, both at Stanford. She helped to found WomenLIFT, an innovative leadership training program for mid-career professionals around the world, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Kathy began her career as a reporter, editor and publishing executive. She later earned an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a Master of Science in Global Health Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco.
Kathy enjoys working at the interfaces of disciplines and sectors and creating cross-cutting teams to address big social problems. Ms. Burke serves on the Board of Dean’s Advisers at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and the Advisory Council for Stanford University Libraries.
