Randall 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 research focuses on how health policies shape the everyday experiences of health care providers and patients in the U.S. and Latin America. He is also interested in how medical professionals and decision-makers conceptualize and respond to the social, political, and environmental determinants of health and illness. Currently, his ethnographic fieldwork focuses on the political, organizational, and interpersonal approaches to providing “intercultural” health care in Chile, focusing on the everyday experiences of biomedical practitioners and Mapuche Indigenous healer/leaders as they navigate this intercultural system to treat illness and provide care.
Secondarily, he has also carried out 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. Previously, he has helped conduct projects on clinical informed consent, patient-reported outcomes in the post-ICU setting, and Centers of Excellence models as a research assistant in the Social Science Lab in Perioperative Medicine (SSLiPM) in Penn’s Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. Randall received his BA with High Honors in Biology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College. He is also a former SUMR Scholar (2013). His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Penn-Mellon Just Futures Initiative, U.S. Fulbright Program, Jacobs Fund, and an interdisciplinary set of institutional grants and awards.