Dr. Justin Andrew Johnson is an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota and a Co-Founding PI of NatCap TEEMs. He is a lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project, a partnership between the University of Minnesota, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Nature Conservancy, Stanford University, the Stockholm Resilience Center, and the World Wildlife Fund. He is an Affiliate at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and works frequently with their Knowledge Initiatives team. Dr. Johnson is a former member of the Foley Lab and the (then) Polasky Lab. He obtained his PhD from Applied Economics in 2014, his bachelor's degree from St. Olaf College in 2005, and was a Fulbright Fellow 2006-2007. 

Dr. Johnson's research focuses on how the economy affects the environment, and vice versa, on global to local scales. Specifically, he is an expert in modeling ecosystem services (how natural capital provides valuable services to humans) and integrating these models with general equilibrium economic models. To do this, he writes open-source software (Python, R, and C/C++) that uses very big data (>8 billion observations) with economic modeling and machine-learning techniques. See Dr. Johnson's research page for details. In addition to ecosystem services, he also researches food security, climate change, agent-based modeling, AI/machine learning, and agricultural management in developing countries. In his spare time, he is a mountain biker, rock climber, and board game designer.

Currently, Dr. Johnson is leading a project focused on the GTAP-InVEST model, which links the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) out of Purdue University with the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model from the Natural Capital Alliance, based at Stanford University and the University of Minnesota. The project team, which includes the founder of GTAP, Thomas Hertel, and the co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, Stephen Polasky, aims to build strong quantitative evidence on how changes in ecosystem services affect economic performance at the macroeconomic level and how global policies can be designed to manage our natural capital sustainably.