Rhianna C. Rogers

Rhianna C. Rogers is director of the Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy and a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Before RAND, she held administrative/teaching appointments in higher education and tribal government (2002–2021). Rogers is an expert on cultural and ethnic studies, intercultural competencies and diversity education, cultural mediation, and virtual exchange programming. She has successfully built and implemented Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming for over a decade in higher education, private/public corporations, and NGOs. She created and ran the Buffalo Project, a longitudinal participatory action research project focused on using cultural data as the baseline for programmatic development and implementation. With numerous awards, Rogers grew the program, forming state and international partnerships, which led Rogers to be recognized as an international expert on equity-centered, community-based participatory action research by the United Nations – Geneva Forum in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Rogers has supported DEI in a variety of capacities, including leading for Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)/German NATO DEU Air Command DEI training (2022), participating in the White House - Year of Evidence in Action Forums (2022), and sitting on the New York State Digital Equity Summits advisory group (2021); the Lumen Circles/Gates Foundation DEI consulting group (2021), and the Kettering Foundation Deliberative Dialogue consulting team (2020–2021).

Before RAND, Rogers was a professor of interdisciplinary studies (history and anthropology) at the State University of New York (SUNY), Empire State College. At SUNY, Rogers held systems appointments as the Ernest Boyer Presidential Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government (2019–2020) and SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence Fellow (2014–2021). She holds a Ph.D. in comparative area studies, an M.A. in history, and a B.A. in social and behavioral sciences from Florida Atlantic University.