David R. Johnson

David Johnson is the Ravi and Eleanor Talwar Rising Star Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Political Science at Purdue University. He is the social science and policy lead in the Network Coordinating Office for the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, the organization coordinating operations of major natural hazards experimental facilities (e.g., wind tunnels, earthquake shake tables) in the United States, and a member of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Health, Food, and Agriculture Resilience Consortium. He is also the co-chair of Society for Risk Analysis’ annual meeting.

David’s interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on decision-making under uncertainty with applications in environmental policy and climate change adaptation. He has presented and published on issues including coastal flood risk management, renewable energy policy, and water scarcity and quality management. He is lead developer of the flood risk model used to assess the impacts of a wide range of flood protection systems for Louisiana’s $50-billion Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. He has also assisted local levee districts with concept development for risk mitigation infrastructure projects. His work evaluating tradeoffs between cost effectiveness, social vulnerability, and uncertainty in prioritization of nonstructural mitigation measures led to the state being awarded over $233 million by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition. His current research on incorporating equity considerations into the evaluation of flood protection projects has been funded by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Gulf Research Program. He also leads a project on managing seismic risks in Los Angeles sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and has funding from the Department of Defense to explore better ways of incorporating downscaled climate projections into operational and planning decisions at defense installations.

Dr. Johnson holds a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, with concentrations in quantitative methods and economics. He previously earned a B.S. in mathematics from North Carolina State University and a MASt in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Prior to joining Purdue, he worked for seven years as a policy analyst and mathematician at RAND Corporation.

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