 Good afternoon. My name is Yongjun Song. I'm school head of industry engineering and it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. David Johnson As many of you may know I joined the Purdue last June and that David was our at that time assistant professor the first Professor assistant professor whom I work to To help and then work to for his promotion here By the way, I joined from University of Arizona Which is a number two basketball team today to number one basketball team Purdue here. Okay, so I Need to mention that okay so David he's our associate professor in industry engineering and political science and he also has a courtesy appointment in civil engineering and Of course when I joined the Purdue I Need to meet with the every you know single professor to learn, you know what they are doing and I Was a truly amazed right the impactful work that the David is doing so if you visit a State of Louisiana Website today you will see the risk assess model of the I mean Louisiana You know that has a lot of the flood and so on and that is Preparation of the adults, you know the the flood for next, you know, the 20 30 years is a very important and There is a risk model that was led Okay by David's team and which impacts over 50 billion not million 50 billion dollars next year 30 years and that's the kind of the impactful work that David is doing and David received a lot of the words including NSF career world and also he's a Outstanding teacher. He received your tool outstanding teaching words from the College of Engineering So let's listen to more about the David. Okay, let's welcome David. All right. Thank you, son I appreciate the introduction and thank you all for being here. I appreciate it I Took kind of a non traditional path to get here. And so I thought I would just kind of talk about How I ended up here in this room today rather than really talking as much on my research But before I jump into it, I do want to acknowledge My wife is here my cats who are not here, but I wouldn't be here without them Certainly in the sacrifices that they have made our cat near cat Who passed away in January, but we had her for 18 years So she has been along the entire journey as well And then the two rascals on the right are Recent acquisitions in the last few months And truth be told only one of them is a rascal The other one is a total sweetheart, but the the one on top of the couch is the reason I have some scratches on my arms at the moment So they've been tremendously helpful in getting me here today So wanted to acknowledge them as well as my students who I believe I got a Found a picture of everyone of every one of them except for one Who was an undergrad that worked with me as well, but have had a lot of students over the years Some of whom are here today as well. I hinted that there would be food and an opportunity to hear me tell stories that I've told them before but They are just fantastic And a joy to work with and I think one of the real reasons why I'm here in academia as opposed to Doing what I had been doing before in academia. So I'll talk a little bit about that and kind of my my path But also want to acknowledge that I have a lot of colleagues that I collaborate with a lot of mentors These are mostly on the mentors list of people that I can talk to and feel like I learned something new every time that I talked to them Just here at Purdue in a whole wealth of different departments They should note, you know some of the students that I've worked with in the past have come Supervised an ag econ student supervised a civil engineering student on the right So it's not all just within industrial engineering and political science And so the connections that I've made have been just extremely valuable And I'm very thankful for all of the folks here and probably the folks that I've forgotten unfortunately But I've been really really fortunate And have also had a lot of mentors elsewhere Including Sandy power at NC State who first sold me on math and Got me to you know think about grad school and so on and others that I still collaborate with today, so In terms of my background, I started out graduated high school in 1999 my mom was a high school math teacher at this school and then another and so she had a lot of old math competition questions just Sitting around and so when I was in school and in high school I would sit in the back of the class regardless of which class it was and just do math problems For fun. She kind of really inspired the love of math for me and these competition problems are you know problems that have Oftentimes sort of a brute force solution and then there's also a trick There's some sort of a beautiful elegant solution to them If you can see it that gives you a great shortcut And I think that's really what got me hooked on doing math Was being able to see those types of like really elegant beautiful solutions to things that are unexpected And that is kind of carried on to what I try and pursue in my own research where now there's not a clever elegant solution to every problem that I work on But I still enjoyed looking for that and trying to find the beauty in the work that I'm doing so I ended up going to NC State and got a bachelor's in math and Met my wife there. We started dating the first weekend of freshman year and now I've been together coming up on our 20th anniversary in January so Graduated from NC State after doing math there Thought that I would get a PhD in math, but I had no idea what Subfield within math. I was interested in I did some research In both math and astrophysics and a tribology physics lab as well and kind of learned that I wasn't going to be an experimentalist I was more just a math major who also liked physics and and Really didn't know exactly what I wanted to do next and so I took a year Worked as a software developer While trying to think about that and then ended up Deciding to go to Cambridge to do a masters in math So that I could have a lot more courses and see what grabbed me and figure out Okay, what do I want to do the PhD in math and by the time I Graduated at Cambridge. I thought I was going to take some time and then do a PhD in Chinese studies instead Which was unexpected Ultimately, I decided against that and again didn't know exactly what I wanted to do next We moved back to the US right around the time of hurricane Katrina in 2005 Didn't have plans and so we ended up moving down to Houston To help with some of the relief efforts there My wife ended up doing an AmeriCorps Vista stent for two years and I ended up working at McKinsey and company where I was doing private management consulting and Had a kind of kindred spirit there that I was working on an engagement in New Hampshire in the dead of winter for four months and I think we were both a little bit disgruntled with the work I enjoyed kind of the creative problem-solving of management consulting but Just wasn't working on the types of problems that I was most interested in I was very interested in trying to kind of use the math skills that I had to have some sort of a real-world impact and Was more interested in kind of public sector social impact than private sector corporate impacts So I ended up quitting my job at McKinsey to start a music company music website That I worked on for a number of years until eventually working on a PhD became to time consuming to keep up with the website and so that was when I ended up at Rand and my colleague at McKinsey was a graduate of the policy program at the Rand Graduate School He knew that I was interested in a wide range of different things and that I was more wanting to do public sector work And so he told me about policy analysis and I thought isn't that just politics? He's like no, no Policy and politics are totally different. You would be great with policy analysis. You'll love it and So as I was evaluating grad schools again thinking about what I would eventually do a PhD in I applied to eight or nine different schools and five different fields and Because again, I'm just easily distracted by like intellectual shiny objects or easily convinced that things are interesting and When I went to visit Rand it just Felt like home that this was going to be a place where I could work on a PhD but also be making a real difference in the world at the same time instead of disappearing for five years and coming back with a dissertation that someone outside of your committee might read eventually, but You never quite know One of the degree requirements at Rand for the policy program there is that you have to have 300 days of billable time working like any other researcher at Rand and so That introduced me to a lot of the different research areas that I'm still working in today I ended up staying at Rand. They kind of made an exception just like academia They don't typically hire their own but I ended up staying at Rand working as a mathematician for a couple of years and then was invited to apply for a position at Purdue for the building sustainable communities cluster hire and this was a group of faculty lines across three different colleges that are people who look at Community resilience and sustainability issues from a very multidisciplinary perspective and When I had been on the job market after finishing my PhD one of the reasons I didn't jump into academia at the time was because I didn't find any Postings that were quite broad enough to encompass all of the things that I wanted to be working on and this cluster hire finally Did have all of those kind of qualities to it And so I thought if I'm going to jump into academia, then this is the time to do it This is going to be the perfect posting. I'm not going to find something as Unique as that cluster hire and and I'm just so glad that I ended up doing it. I've really been enjoying my time here It's been great. So I Can talk a little bit about some of the work that I got turned on to at Rand that I'm still working on today Including what son mentioned. I do flood risk modeling for the Louisiana State government Have gotten involved in some projects in Texas as well and collaborations with people elsewhere across the country I developed a greenhouse gas emissions model for biofuels feedstocks for DOE and That has led into a lot of work here collaborating with people in ag econ at Purdue as well as hydrologists and crop scientists at other institutions looking at sustainable agriculture and Looking at also kind of biofuels and renewable energy systems and Then did some work with the El Dorado irrigation district in northern, California working on water scarcity management under climate change and When I was trying to think about my tenure Package and kind of what my trajectory would be like in academia. I was thinking like am I going to have to give some Of these up to really focus Or can I still have a really broad portfolio if I can think of kind of an underlying theme behind all of it? and an understanding of why I'm interested in working in all of these different things Given that they take totally different methods different skill sets you know different topical knowledge and Really I sort of realize that what really interests me is just kind of long-range planning for risk management in the environmental policy space and Thinking about better ways that we can both assess risk as well as make better decisions about how to manage it and and so that's kind of the banner that I work under and Look at how do we cope with uncertainty about future conditions trade-offs between different objectives? and then most recently I've gotten really interested and Equity implications of the work that I'm doing how to incorporate equity into the evaluation of projects for risk mitigation And the state in Louisiana incorporated some of that work into their latest coastal master plan And so I'm really excited Unfortunate to be working with policy makers and officials that really value some of the same things that I do and Are interested in pushing the boundaries of science? Directly into policy and so I was just tremendously in the right place at the right time to kind of get started on this trajectory and And so what I've kind of taken away from it That I would share is that for people kind of seeking tenure Especially if you have really broad interests like mine, and you know don't compromise on a good fit don't just take a position because They want to hire you and if it's not going to be a good fit then You're not going to be happy with the position You're not going to be as successful as you might be if you feel like you have to put yourself in a box that you don't want to be in So don't compromise on that. That was one thing that I was just thrilled when I was interviewing here You know I asked hey Is it going to be a problem if I spend a lot of time writing publications that end up in the gray literature? You know if I'm publishing something in a 300 page technical appendix to a state government report Rather than journalifying everything. Is that okay? And they said well, that's great Concrete evidence, you know of the impact of your work that if a state government is publishing it themselves That's clear evidence that they value it and are using it And so that was what assured me that it was going to be a good fit I would also say don't be discouraged by failures. I Ended up being either PI or co-PI on I think six NSF proposals before getting one And then I was co-PI on that one brought a few more that got rejected and then in the year before going up for tenure I got a lead PI on an NSF grant looking at seismic risk in Los Angeles Again a new topic for me, but you know Infrastructure risk under natural hazards so similar kind of under undercurrent DoD grants looking at incorporating downscale climate projections into decision-making for defense installations National academies Gulf research program Project on incorporating equity into decision-making for flood risk management and then an NSF career award And so kind of the flood gates eventually opened for all of these things that I'm leading And and so Eventually you'll get there and don't be discouraged and and take risks, you know kind of along those same lines. Don't be afraid to Try on new ideas even when you're under the pressure and tenure clock and Think about you know, what is the societal impact that you want your work to have? As much as your own scholarly identity so With that I'll pause for questions Questions we're very fortunate to have you and I'll get a chance to keep you here the question is At the beginning who actually found you and they invite you for to apply for the job One of my colleagues in the industrial engineering department who went to NC State with us when I was an undergrad Knew what I had been up to at Rand And found out about this cluster and said you should really contact this guy David. He's a friend of mine And I think he would be a perfect fit so That was another coincidence of being in the right place at the right time to kind of find out about the position Yeah, anyone else? They would great talk. Can you talk a little bit about? someone trying to enter policy like From a completely different perspective and I think that probably happened to you when you went to run Maybe I don't know with which stage but how do you approach these stakeholders? How do you think about? Making changes like what are some things that people may not think about right like for example You mentioned the policy analysis was politics, right? There's a big difference which people may not know about can talk a little bit about that Yeah, in terms of just kidding started Like I said, I was kind of in the right place at the right time But have been continuing to try and build other connections as well over the years, so I think what I would recommend is that first You need to just go talk To stakeholders or officials that work in an area that you're interested in and you think that you might have something that you Can contribute but don't go in with a sales pitch, you know It's more of an informational interview trying to connect and trying to understand What are their pain points, you know and what are problems that they have that they Could do better one if they had certain data that doesn't exist or if they Could analyze something that they just don't know how to at this stage and just trying to understand kind of where They feel like there could be improvement in their own work and and then if you feel like okay, yeah I can contribute to that Then look at writing proposals with them and having them on board Look at trying to get some preliminary Results or something that you could show them that is suggestive that you know, maybe there's something that we can work on together but you always have to keep in mind that working on a government client timeline and budget is Different than an academic timeline and budget and those don't always align very well So it's a little bit tricky, but you just have to be really persistent about it Be happy to talk about it more Any last question If not, I needed to mention that the in addition to huge Society society impact that you saw so we have a monthly meeting with our Undergraduate students that happens to be yesterday and you know the engineers design make things and industrial engineer design and make things better and Any type of the systems and so we ask the students that what are the kind of the Problems, okay that you didn't know that you learned and we were talking about you David the kind of impact that you are making to society as well as our student is Huge and looking forward to seeing your continued success next a few years. Okay, so thank you so much. Okay