David Johnson

David Johnson is the 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 National Science Foundation’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure, the organization that coordinates operations of major natural hazards experimental facilities like wind tunnels and shake tables, and a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Health, Food, and Agriculture Resilience Consortium. He also co-chairs the Society for Risk Analysis’ annual meeting.

Johnson’s interdisciplinary research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty with applications in environmental policy and climate change adaptation. He studies issues including coastal flood risk management, community preferences for seismic risk mitigation, renewable energy policy, and water scarcity and quality management. Most notably, 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. Much of his current research focuses on quantifying community priorities, measuring the fragility of access to essential services across socioeconomic strata, and valuing impacts associated with infrastructure service disruption typically excluded from benefit-cost analyses.