Rhianna C. Rogers

Rhianna C. Rogers is the director of the Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy (CAREP), a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School. Before RAND, Rogers 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. She has successfully built and implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming for over a decade in higher education, private/public corporations, and NGOs. From 2010 to 2021, Rogers 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-wide and international partnerships, and cocreated Sustainable Progress and Equality Collective (SPEC) with advocates across the United States. This work led Rogers to be featured as an expert on participatory action research in the United Nations – Geneva Forum in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Rogers leads competency-based work in a variety of capacities, including running training for California's Law Enforcement Command College (2022–present), Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)/German NATO DEU Air Command (2022), participanting in the White House - Year of Evidence in Action (2022) as well as sitting on the New York Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department Digital Equity Summits advisory group (2021), and the Kettering Foundation Deliberative Dialogue International Institute consulting team (2020–2021).

Before RAND, Rogers was most recently a tenured, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies (history and anthropology) and a program coordinator at the State University of New York (SUNY) - Empire State University (formerly Empire State College). At SUNY, Rogers held two system appointments, one as the Ernest Boyer Presidential Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government (2019–2020) and the other as a SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence Fellow (2014–2021). Rogers was also a visiting professor of anthropology at the American University of Technology in Lebanon (2017–2018) and served two terms as the coordinator of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (2017–2019 and 2014–2017). Rogers holds a Ph.D. in comparative studies from Florida Atlantic University.