Tian Walker is in the 6th year of the doctoral program in biological anthropology. She is interested in health justice and health disparities with a particular focus on diabetes. Her dissertation work combines evolutionary biology, advanced statistical analysis, and ethnographic methods in an effort to expand the way that people think about diabetes. While her focus is on type 1 diabetes, she also works with World Health Organization datasets to assess global trends in all types of diabetes  with the hope of building on ressearch that informs easing the burden and death toll of diabetes. 

She has been actively involved in research projects in the Stress Adaptation and Resilience (STAR) lab with Zachary DuBois including the Trans Resilience and Health in Sociopolitical Contexts Study (https://transresiliencestudy.com/) and the Global Health Biomarker Lab with Josh Snodgrass. She is currently a part of a research team studying houselessness and health (https://blogs.uoregon.edu/weaverlab/houselessness-research/). As a scholar activist, she also stays connected to a local non-profit organization called Diabetes Community Care Team that is dedicated to providing physical, mental, and emotional support to all people with diabetes. 

She believes that biological anthropology has an important role to play in medicine, and one of the initial ways this connection can be established is through work dismantling misconceptions about diabetes and "race". Another main area of interest is creating more mechanisms for "patient experience" to be measured, valued, and considered data. 

She aims to publish on her current projects this year.