Jeremiah Goulka, 43, is delighted to be joining the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University School of Law as a senior fellow. He will be leading the new academic center’s initiatives to translate its research findings and to get them into the hands of officials who need them with the goal of aligning criminal justice practices with public health goals.
Jeremiah was an analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he was a core member of the RAND Center for Quality Policing. He conducted research on criminal justice, diversity, and national security. He led studies on issues ranging from anti-gang initiatives to DNA databasing to an Iranian cult group. He served as the legal staffer for the Congressionally-mandated Military Leadership Diversity Commission, and he was a member of the RAND research team that helped end the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.
After Hurricane Katrina, Jeremiah was co-founder and de facto chief of staff of the Southeast Louisiana Criminal Justice Recovery Task Force, a joint local-state-federal effort to rebuild and reform the metropolitan New Orleans criminal justice system in the wake of the storm.
Jeremiah was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, hired in the Attorney General’s Honors Graduate Program. He worked in the Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch, representing the United States in constitutional, foreign affairs, and administrative litigation in federal and state courts. After graduating from law school, he was a law clerk for Judge W. Eugene Davis on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Lafayette, Louisiana.
He has been as a Professor of Policy Analysis in the Pardee RAND Graduate School, a Visiting Fellow at the Northwestern University School of Law Center for International Human Rights, and a Tutor in American History at the University of Edinburgh.
Jeremiah has written about public safety, security, and climate change for The New York Times, The American Prospect, TomDispatch, and other outlets. He also published a history book a while back.
Jeremiah received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, an LL.B. from the University of Edinburgh Law School, and his A.B. in History from Bowdoin College. He spent his junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris.
An avid traveler, he has been to all fifty states and all six populated continents. But now that he is a father, he mostly stays home and spends his free time with his kids and performing music for children. He is a singer-songwriter in the acoustic kindie rock duo King Bullfrog, which performs several times per month around Washington, DC.
Jeremiah is a fellow of the British American Project and an assistant editor of the literary magazine Barrelhouse. He lives with his wife and children on Capitol Hill.