Dr. Rick Johnston is a Technical Officer in the unit of Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (WASH) and Health at the World Health Organization. He co-leads the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme on Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP), which maintains global databases about WASH services in households, schools, and health care facilities. He also leads WHO’s work on monitoring wastewater generation and treatment, in collaboration with UN-Habitat. He is active in programmes that make use of these data, such as estimating the burden of disease related to inadequate WASH. He co-leads or contributes substantially to monitoring of multiple SDG indicators (1.4.1, 3.8.1, 3.9.2, 4.a.1, 6.1.1, 6.2.1a, 6.2.1b, 6.3.1).
Prior to joining WHO in 2013, he was team lead for water supply and treatment at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) for four years, working primarily on water quality research in Africa and Asia. Between 1996 and 2009 he spent seven years in Bangladesh, working with UNICEF on arsenic mitigation.
Rick holds degrees in environmental engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD) and the Johns Hopkins University (MSc). His technical background is in drinking water treatment, with a specialization in arsenic chemistry. He is an author on over 80 publications, with over 6000 citations and an h-index of 37.