T. Ryan Johnson

About Me

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2026. I use big administrative data, geographic information systems (GIS), and formal mathematical models of choice to study how institutional rules and market forces shape the behavior and attitudes of individuals.

Research Interests

American Politics: representation and electoral systems
Political Methodology: Bayesian statistics, causal inference, spatial statistics
Formal Theory: political economy, structural estimation

Publications

bin Oslan, Afiq and T. Ryan Johnson (2026). “Spies in a barrel: When to reel in espionage.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 38 (2), 87–109.

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Johnson, T. Ryan and Dietrich Vollrath (2020). “The Role of Land in Temperate and Tropical Agriculture.” Economica 87 (348), 901–937.

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Work in Progress

“Kriging for Robust Standard Errors”
“On using a random effect with a Gaussian process prior instead of a spatial trend”
“Flood Risk and Turnout”
“Modeling Spatial Effects with Gaussian Processes”
“Estimating the Random Coefficients Logit with Voter Files”

Teaching

Saint Louis University, Department of Computer Science

Databases (CSCI 4710/5710), Fall 2026
Introduction to Computer Science: Taming Big Data (CSCI 1070), Fall 2024

Saint Louis University, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS 4010/5010), Fall 2024

Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Political Science

TA for PhD courses:

Math Camp (Summer 2021, Summer 2022)
Applied Statistical Programming (Spring 2022)
Formal Models of Political Institution (Fall 2021)
American Political Institutions (Fall 2021)
Causal Inference (Spring 2021)
Computational Social Science (Fall 2020)
Theories of Individual and Collective Choice II (Spring 2020)
Mathematical Modeling (Fall 2019)

Sam Houston State University, Department of Mathematics & Statistics

Developmental Mathematics II, Fall 2011–Spring 2013