Rahela Bursac, MPH
Chief Architect of Data
When she was small, Rahela and a friend spontaneously decided to visit the friend’s mother at work. The adults, who were collectively watching and not watching the kids, didn’t notice as they stood up and walked away. Rahela was two. She returned several hours later to a crowd of worried adults. As she asked for water, she handed her mother a rusty can she had diligently filled with pieces of broken glass while making her way home through the city of Zagreb from the park where she and her friend had stopped to play.
Even in childhood, Rahela cleaned and organized. She’d arrange her friends’ stuffed animals in order by size. As a teenager, she’d organize and then reorganize her music collection. Later, after completing her undergraduate degree at New York University, she gravitated toward organizing data.
Rahela is driven by the intellectual challenge of puzzling through complicated, messy things. Her work in public health includes the study and prevention of intentional injuries (homicide, suicide, and assault) in addition to the treatment of mental health and substance use disorders in correctional and community settings. She went on to obtain her masters from the Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health, where she studied epidemiology and surveillance systems.
Supervision, mentorship, and education are integral to Rahela’s data management approach. She enjoys demystifying data systems and analytics to help foster those skills in others. While Rahela loves organizing things, she also appreciates that life is messy and that part of being human is chaotic. As an artist, Rahela embraces everything messy to create her paintings and loves being a scientist because she knows that part of life will always be an enigma.