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Geoffrey L. Johnston Ph.D. Student in Sustainable Development School of International and Public
Affairs/Earth Institute |
Email: glj2108.columbia.edu My curriculum vitae: CV
Current Research Blog Publications
Images Important Links FilesIntroduction:
First, hello and welcome. My name is Geoff; I am
currently a Ph.D.
student in the Sustainable Development program at Columbia
University. If you are interested in the program, you can find
more information here
and here.
A little background: I graduated from the University of
Notre Dame, summa cum laude,
in 2005 with a Bachelor of Science in
Honors Mathematics and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. From
there I taught in a Mississippi high school for two years as a member
of Teach for America and then a further year in a Cleveland charter
school (5th and 6th grade math and science).
In the course of my studies, I researched various
programs designed to promote holistic human development, eventually
discovering the program in which I am currently enrolled. Now I
am here in New York, researching, studying, and hopefully
helping.
Research
Interests:
My primary research interest is learning more about poverty: its
causes, its effects, and its cures.
In pursuit of this broader agenda, I am currently
working on a few specific projects.
First, I am building mathematical models of malaria
transmission incorporating socioeconomic and climatic factors.
The purpose of these models is to help public health agencies better
predict where and when malarial epidemics will arise, as well as
provide likely patterns of drug resistance development. My
advisors on this project are David Fidock, a microbiologist at Columbia
(Fidock
Lab), David Smith, a malaria modeler at Resources for the Future (RFF), and Daniel Ruis-Carrascal, a
researcher at the International Research Institute for Climate and
Society (IRI).
This project was the basis for my (successful) research proposal for
the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF).
A second project that I am working on is quantifying
the effectiveness of a variety of development interventions currently
being employed in the Millennium Village Project (MVP).
Within the development community today there is great debate over the
value of foreign aid, with positions ranging from the belief that aid
does more harm than good to the belief that aid is necessary for
development. I am working with the MVP team to rigorously
quantify the impact that various interventions are having and their
cost-effectiveness. More data will provide
macroeconomists and other aid researchers and practitioners with inputs
to support or falsify their theories.
Finally, I am also working on a project to quantify the
environmental effects of economic development in Puerto Rico from 1970
to 2001. Specifically, I am examining how road construction
affected deforestation in PR by using GIS maps to determine the extent
of "road-connectedness" of various municipalities and then running a
regression analysis with deforestation as the response variable.
This will be a fixed-effect panel data analysis (we have three sets of
island maps) where "road-connectedness" is a novel index generated by
integrating population from a given point along roads weighted by
travel-time.
Current
Research:
All results here are unpublished, and, therefore, are subject to
revision. Use with appropriate caution!
Here is a presentation that I gave at Lamont-Doherty Observatory,
Columbia University, on May 11th, 2009 titled Modeling Malarial Transmission and Drug
Resistance for P. falciparum and P. vivax.
Regarding the modeling of malarial drug resistance, I created a MATLAB program to simulate the evolution of drug resistance in Plasmodium, incorporating the trade-off between improved fitness under drug pressure and decreased fitness in absence of pressure. You can download the source code (in MATLAB) here: File 1 and File 2.
When you run the code in MATLAB, be sure that both of
the files are in
the same directory (Pfresis4.m calls killingfntm2 as a function).
Some
screenshots:
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On the topic of program evaluation, I wrote a paper recently on the
prospects of success for the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM). You can find the paper
here: Roll Back Malaria.
Finally, the team (including myself) that is working on
the Puerto Rico deforestation/road connectivity regression analysis
created a presentation to lay out the outline of the project; you can
find the presentation here.
Publications:
“MPD Thruster Performance Analytic Models,” Gilland, J. and
Johnston, G., AIP Conf. Proc. 654, 516 (2003), DOI:10.1063/1.1541334. Link to PDF
Contributing Author to National Nanotechnology
Initiative (NNI) Report:
“Nanotechnology and the Environment: Applications and Implications,
Report of the National Nanotechnology Initiative Workshop, May 2-3,
2003.” Download
(I wrote the inserts on pages 5, 15, 23, and 27.)
Regarding the NNI report, I tried to include
information regarding the health effects of nanoparticles on rats, but
was overruled; I think that this was unfortunate, as negative effects
are still a type of implication.
Teaching Materials:
When I TA my first course, this section will be filled with valuable learning materials.
» I am a member of a new organization created to help spread awareness of the mission of UNICEF. This group, called UNICEF's Next Generation (UNG), is currently raising funds for micronutrient supplements for children in Guatemala. This is a very worthy project, and any support you could provide would be most appreciated. The secure website for donations is administered through UNICEF and can be found here. Thank you!
The Sustainable Development Doctoral Society sponsors a
series of lectures throughout the year; you can find a syllabus here.
Forms:
Here is where you will eventually be
able to enter comments, thoughts, etc., and post to the server.
But
one thing at a time!
