Dr. Karabi Acharya

Senior Director | Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Pronouns: she/her
Dr. Karabi Acharya smiling outside.

Dr. Karabi Acharya is a leading global public health practitioner. She has lived and worked in more than twenty countries across Europe, Africa, and South Asia with organizations that include the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and USAID. She is currently senior director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, largest philanthropy in the United States devoted to health, where she leads the Global Ideas for US Solutions portfolio. Dr. Acharya lives in Pennsylvania.

Presentations from Facing Race 2026

From renowned public health expert Dr. Karabi Acharya comes a profound, beautifully written exploration of what it means to be Multiracial today—and a transformative call to build a culture of absolute belonging.

Multiracial people are the fastest-growing population in the United States, yet they remain almost invisible in our institutions, narratives, and data. Until recently, Americans were categorized as Black or White, sometimes Asian or Hispanic, without other options or the choice to identify as more than one. Even while long-overdue conversations about race have deepened, the thirty-four million Americans who identify as Multiracial have been left on the sidelines: unseen, underrepresented, and facing an epidemic of isolation as a result.

In Multitudes, Dr. Acharya—a Multiracial academic, public health leader, and lifelong activist for inclusion—blends groundbreaking research with personal stories, interviews, and vivid real-world examples to illuminate the Multiracial experience. The result is both mirror and manifesto: a stereotype-shattering, deeply human portrait of identity, resilience, and connection that argues that embracing our complexity—our multitudes—is not a barrier to wholeness but the path to it.