Odis Johnson Jr.

Odis Johnson Jr., Ph.D., is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Policy and STEM Equity at Johns Hopkins University, with faculty appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Education as Executive Director of the Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, and in the Department of Sociology. He also directs the National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies (ICQCM), and serves as co-editor of the Sociology of Education, a journal of the American Sociological Association.

Dr. Johnson’s work on the interrelated topics of social policy, data science, and race have been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Joyce Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and six times by the NSF as Principal Investigator. He has recently led the Fatal Interactions with Police Study, and the Race, Gender, and Social Control in STEM Lab with support from NSF. Currently, Dr. Johnson is designing the data transparency, accountability, and reporting infrastructure of the newly established Johns Hopkins University Police Department.

A transdisciplinary scholar, his work appears in the leading journals of 11 scientific disciplines and fields. In 2021, he received three-year appointments to scientific advisory boards at the Educational Testing Service, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Education, and provided expert testimony to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine about the future of research methods and measurement. A noted voice for justice and equity, Dr. Johnson’s work and ideas about social change were mentioned in more than 400 broadcast and news media outlets in 2022.