Odis Johnson Jr., PhD, is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Social Policy and STEM Equity at Johns Hopkins University, and the Edmund W. Gordon Chair of Social Policy and Evaluation at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). At Hopkins, Dr. Johnson is core faculty in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI), the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Education as Executive Director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, and in the Department of Sociology. He also directs the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Computational Methodologies (ICQCM). He completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan and post-doctoral training at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Johnson’s work on the interrelated topics of social policy, quantitative methodology, and race has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joyce Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. A transdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Johnson has published in the leading journals of 12 scientific fields, among them the Journal of Criminal Justice, American Journal of Public Health, Review of Educational Research, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Social Science & Medicine, and the American Ethnologist. He is the immediate past editor-in-chief of the Sociology of Education, a journal of the American Sociological Association, and the current senior co-editor of the Review of Educational Research, the premiere journal of the American Educational Research Association.
His field-defining accomplishments in research have received several commendations, including a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, the 2013 AERA Outstanding Review of Research Award, the 2015 Emerald Publishing Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award, selection as an Scholar of the American Institutes for Research in 2023, the Marsal Distinguished Education Researcher Alumni Award from the University of Michigan in 2025, and induction as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association in 2026. A noted voice for justice and racial reform, Dr. Johnson’s work and ideas about social change are mentioned in hundreds of news outlets each year, including 881 in the year 2023.
BlueSky: @NEqualityMatrix
Keywords: Neighborhoods; policing; housing; policy; race; gender.
