Randall “Randy” Burson is an MD student at the Perelman School of Medicine and a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Situated at the intersection between anthropology and health services research, his work focuses on how health policies shape the everyday experiences of patients and health care providers in the U.S. and Latin America. He is also interested in how medical professionals and policy decision-makers conceptualize and respond to the social, political, and ecological factors that shape health and health care. Currently, his ethnographic fieldwork focuses on the politics and practices of “intercultural” health care in Wallmapu/Southern Chile. Adopting a participatory approach, this project follows how biomedical and Mapuche Indigenous health practitioners, public officials, and patients negotiate multiple medical approaches to pursue health, provide care, and strengthen Mapuche projects of bodily and territorial sovereignty.

Secondarily, he is conducting research on how physicians and medical students understand the social and political world around them and how they learn and teach structural competency and social topics in medical education; early findings of this work have been published in Social Science & Medicine with Drs. Olivia Familusi and Justin Clapp.

Previously, he has conducted and published research on clinical informed consent, patient-reported outcomes in the post-ICU setting, Centers of Excellence models, and pediatric vaccine delivery as a research assistant in Penn’s Social Science Lab in Perioperative Medicine (SSLiPM) and as a 2013 Summer Undergraduate Minority Research (SUMR) Scholar at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. Randy received his BA with High Honors in Biology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Program, Penn-Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative, Jacobs Fund, and an interdisciplinary set of institutional grants and awards.

He welcomes opportunities to connect, especially with students who are interested in pursuing an MD-PhD in the social sciences and humanities and/or who are underrepresented in medicine and anthropology.