Alumni spotlight on Carolina Johnson: Contending with the complexity of real-world data
Dr. Carolina Johnson is a Senior Data Scientist with King County's Department of Community and Human Services Performance Measurement and Evaluation unit.
She earned a Political Science PhD from the University of Washington (UW) in 2017 and took the political science CSSS track. Johnson’s work focuses on bringing together cross-sector data to help understand the people King County serves.
She spoke with CSSS about her public sector work and appreciation for statistical methods that contend with the complexity of real-world data. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What has been your career path to your current position?
Answer: It’s slightly wacky! I went into undergrad at Harvard thinking I’d major in either physics or art history. I ended up double-majoring in Social Studies and Women’s Studies. In my senior year, I ran for political office in Massachusetts. I didn’t become a state representative, but my experiences on the campaign trail motivated me to do a political science master's at Oxford. After that, I spent a couple of years doing research and policy work, including diving into accountability principles for research organizations at the One World Trust, and an extended diversion as an etymological research assistant at Oxford English Dictionary.
Although I’d always had an affinity for math and science, my first two degree programs didn’t have a deep focus on quantitative work. I eventually decided to go back for a PhD in political science at UW, because I wanted to gain more rigorous quantitative skills and be able to produce high-quality research.
I went into the PhD with the plan to become a professor. The training was super useful, and I had a positive, fun experience doing research. But by the end of the program, I decided not to go into academia — in large part because I wanted to stay in the Pacific Northwest (if you're trying to make it as an academic, you rarely get to stay where you did your PhD!). I also wanted to try applying my skills in a real-world setting, especially in the non-profit or public sector.
I ended up getting a job at King County soon after I graduated. Over the last seven years, I’ve been supporting the growth and transformation of how one of King County's biggest departments thinks about and uses data. It’s been exciting!
Q: What’s the focus of your work now?
A: King County’s Department of Community and Human Services is a large department that coordinates and helps to deliver a wide range of services – from providing support to people experiencing behavioral health crises, to supporting veterans and seniors, to distributing millions of dollars of rental assistance, running isolation and quarantine centers during the pandemic, and supporting early childhood interventions.
This work generates large quantities of sensitive data that are important to implement and evaluate programs, but also require complex management and protection.
In my role, I help build sustainable strategies for King County health and human services to integrate data across divisional silos, while developing new, client-centered analyses that can bring together cross-sector data to better understand the people we serve. I help build processes to that make it easier for us to link data across systems, coordinate equity-centered data governance practices that protect data while being responsive to the needs of our communities, and help develop creative problem-focused data use. It’s been a lot of collaborative work to remove barriers between our many data systems!
Then, we do targeted analysis to generate a more complete picture of the experiences of folks that we serve in our community. Some analysis projects I’ve led have included developing estimates of how many people are experiencing homelessness in our region but are not connected to our homeless service providers, and helping to identify potential service touch points where we could potentially intervene to support people at risk of a fatal overdose.
As the senior data scientist on the team, a large part of my job is building tools (including internal R packages) and providing technical assistance and training to a large and growing team of evaluators and data scientists. It’s been super rewarding. I now run weekly office hours to offer technical help for people on our team working with data — assisting with things like how to work in R, store data in the cloud, and conceptualize data problems. Assisting with the development of this team of smart, motivated people has been one of my favorite career experiences.
Q: What did you take away from your time with CSSS?
A: I’ve always been most driven by questions about concrete problems happening in the world, and wanting to figure out or shape solutions. I also have a strong commitment to the value of multiple ways of knowing, looking at both quantitative and qualitative strategies.
So, I really appreciated how CSSS faculty engaged with specific, complex, nuanced approaches to data. At CSSS, quantitative training isn’t about trying to force the world to fit some narrowly defined model parameters or basic assumptions. Instead, it focuses on creating modeling frameworks and ways to describe data that capture and reflect the complexity and the interdependencies of the world that we live in.
I actually didn't know about CSSS when I started my PhD, but my interest in methods took me straight into the CSSS track! I started working with Christopher Adolph, and taking CSSS classes.
Influential courses included Multivariate Data Analysis with Elena Erosheva, an early iteration of ‘Text as Data’ with John Wilkerson (I still work with text data when I can!), and Data Visualization with Chris Adolph. It wasn’t until later in my PhD that I fully understood the awesome value of having the CSSS community, and realized I had become a part of it!
Q: What did you research during your PhD?
A: My dissertation focused on participatory budgeting, a type of public process in which residents of a community are given control over how local public budgets are spent. I combined quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the case for participatory budgeting as a strategy of democratic renewal, and to evaluate its local community-level democratic outcomes. I got a National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Award, which provided the resources to add new quantitative data collection. This included implementing a multinational survey of community organizations and developing a training data set for a supervised machine learning analysis of evolution of local political discourse.
I had such a fun time doing that project! Now that I’m not doing research day-to-day, I do miss the creativity and care that goes into that kind of academic research. But I also really enjoy my current work at King County.
Q: If you could give one piece of advice to yourself during your PhD, what would you say?
A: Stay focused on doing high-quality, creative work — without worrying too much about what other people think. Grad school can be disheartening at times, especially if you focus on external validation or competition — whether it's for grades, grants, or getting certain kinds of opportunities. Rather than worrying whether others know you’re good at what you do, focus on doing high-quality work you know matters, and stick with it!
Q: What was one of your favorite spots around the UW campus or the university district in Seattle?
A: On the non-quad side of Smith Hall, there's a delightful rhododendron garden (Grieg Garden). It was my favorite spot on spring afternoons during my PhD, and I think back to it now every year during springtime.
Learn more about Johnson’s work on her LinkedIn or reach out by email at cajohnson@kingcounty.gov. 
Johnson in a park with a duck.
