We work with communities to hear what disease areas they care about the most and how best they think we can work together to tackle them. These partnerships cover everything from working with the public to design a trial to collaborating to spread the news of discoveries to those who need it the most. This core works with the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) and other industry, nonprofit, and government stakeholders – as well as anyone who wants to join the movement in making health research the new normal.

  • Deborah Burnet, MD
    University of Chicago

    Community and Collaboration Core Leader

Deborah Burnet
ITM Community and Collaboration Core Leader

Deb Burnet, MD, leads the ITM’s Community and Collaboration Core, bridging the gap between medical research discoveries and their implementation in Chicago communities.

Burnet is a professor of medicine and pediatrics and section chief of General Internal Medicine, and her research interests revolve around disease prevention, internal medicine, pediatrics, childhood obesity, and diabetes. Her current work examines the effectiveness of community-based programs in stopping the rise of obesity and type 2 diabetes in African-American youth.

She works with the Chicago Center for Diabetes Translational Research, where she helped establish the Reach-Out Chicago Children’s Diabetes Prevention Project, a family-oriented diabetes risk reduction program. Burnet is also passionate about improving medical education, trains physicians on cultural competence in their practice, and serves on various National Institutes of Health (NIH) review panels regarding community-based research.

Reach her at dburnet@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu.

Core Site Leaders