Barry Johnson is a nonresident fellow for the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. His research focuses on expanding access to data for evidence building, methods for protecting data confidentiality, responsible uses of AI, and the distributions of income and wealth. His recent work focuses on developing new tiers of researcher data access, including synthetic tax data, and methods for producing an automated, privacy-preserving validation server. 

Before joining the Urban Institute, Johnson was the chief data and analytics officer at the Internal Revenue Service, the director of the IRS Statistics of Income Division, and the statistical official for the US Department of the Treasury. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a recipient of the Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics. He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and economics with honors from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in economics from American University.