Diane Hill has a profound commitment to working with and improving urban communities. Her scholarly work predominately focuses on building strong and healthy urban communities; developing models to advance community engagement in higher education, with emphasis on urban university-community partnerships; advancing health care equity and social justice; and promoting community-based participatory research on local, state, regional, and national levels.

Hill has devoted her professional career to helping the state’s disenfranchised and underserved residents achieve educational, economic, and health equity. She has been awarded various grants to further the provision of services to communities in New Jersey. She was part of a team at the New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science at Rutgers that received a $5 million National Institutes of Health grant to launch outreach campaigns and expand access to COVID-19 testing for underserved and vulnerable communities in New Jersey. She also was awarded a Global Health Seed Grant from Rutgers Global Health Institute for the initiative “Transdisciplinary Intergenerational Community Engagement Model for Senior Health Promotion in Greater Newark.” Additionally, she was awarded a grant from ScreenNJ to support a cancer screening campaign, led by the Center for Health Equity and Community Engagement and Advocates for Healthy Living Initiative, designed to improve colorectal and/or lung cancer screening rates among Greater Newark senior citizens.

Hill’s research interests include advancing community engagement in higher education, with special emphasis on university-community partnerships at urban universities; school-based youth college and career development and engagement demonstration models; and community-based participatory research. She currently serves as director of the Center for Health Equity and Community Engagement (CHECE) at Rutgers’ School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA). CHECE aims to build upon proven and effective community engagement strategies developed by Rutgers University–Newark’s Office of University-Community Partnerships and the scholarship and knowledge-based services that are the hallmarks of SPAA.