Bio


Kathy Burke is a Senior Advisor and Lecturer at the Human and Planetary Health initiative in the Doerr School for Sustainability and a Senior Advisor to the Center for Innovation in Global Health. She is a co-instructor in SUSTAIN 103 Human and Planetary Health. She works across campus advancing the field of human and planetary health, setting strategy, creating and advising teams, 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 hosted at Stanford. She co-founded 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, Ms. Burke spent 15 years as a reporter, editor and publishing executive. She 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.