She is the founder of GoodLands, an organization which aims to mobilize the Catholic Church to use its land for environmental and social justice purposes.

[1][2][3][4][5] Burhans was the Chief Cartographer for the first unified digital global map of the Catholic Church in history, which was premiered in the Vatican in 2016.

[11] Burhans was born in Manhattan, New York to Debra, a professor of computer science, and William, a researcher in molecular oncology, who died in 2019.

While visiting a monastery in northwestern Pennsylvania during a weeklong service trip, she observed that the monastery lacked comprehensive land management plans, and began researching the ways that improved land management of worldwide Catholic landholdings could aid environmentalism.

[13] She became increasingly interested in the environmental possibilities of mapping and ecologically activating the Catholic Church's global landholdings.