Department/Institute Affiliation(s)

DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING/ Center for Humanitarian Health

Takeru (Tak) Igusa is a professor of civil and systems engineering and a leading expert in systems science. He is known for bringing new insights to complex problems in the health sciences through the use of systems principles and analytical techniques.

Igusa’s background in engineering and applied mathematics has allowed him to work across a diversity of fields, from epidemiology to community resilience to civil and mechanical structures. The collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of his research has led to joint appointments in the departments of Mental Health and International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.

Igusa is currently working with colleagues at JHSPH on a CDC project to model community resilience in the event of natural disasters and with physicians and scientists in the School of Medicine on an NIH project on differential equation-based models for autoimmune rheumatic disorders, among other projects. He is also collaborating with a team of experts in the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Prevention to create policies and planning tools that will increase the safety of autonomous vehicle testing and deployment.

He has spearheaded a number of research and educational initiatives at Johns Hopkins, including an NIH-funded Global Center for Childhood Obesity, where he served as director of the education and training core for four years.

Igusa’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Science Foundation, NASA, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. He has had more than 75 papers published in peer-reviewed journals.

He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineering and serves on the editorial board of the journal Structural Safety. He also serves on the advisory boards of Johns Hopkins’ Global mHealth Initiative and Center for Leadership Education. He was a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at The University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 2013 and received an invitational fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1997.

Igusa received his bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1977 and his MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979 and 1983, respectively.  He was a professor of Civil Engineering at Northwestern University before joining Johns Hopkins in 1999.