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PhD in Sustainable Development Student Profiles
Geoffrey Johnston
www.columbia.edu/~glj2108
Geoffrey Johnston is a second-year PhD student in the PhD program in Sustainable Development. His goal for the program is to explore and develop methodologies for helping peoples lift themselves out of poverty, especially in developing countries. He is interested in building spatiotemporal mathematical models of malaria transmission that can be utilized to develop optimal sets of interventions. He is also interested in market failures and agent modeling in economics.
After graduating from the University of Notre Dame with a BS in pure mathematics and a BA in philosophy, summa cum laude, Geoffrey Johnston was a corps member in Teach for America, teaching high school in Mississippi for two years and grade school in Cleveland for an additional year. He was a 2001 U.S. Presidential Scholar, has coauthored a paper on modeling magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters for NASA, worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and studied law, physics, and maths for a year at New College, Oxford. He is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow as well as an IGERT International Development and Globalization Fellow. He encourages you to visit unicef.org and give whatever you can.