Christian Johnson is a Machine Learning Engineer and Policy Strategist with Protect Democracy’s VoteShield team. Prior to joining Protect Democracy, he was a data scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he studied the applications of machine learning to problems in the national security realm, including disinformation. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of North Carolina, and his PhD in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His doctoral research focused on applying statistical techniques to detect dark matter in astrophysical datasets — a skillset that he now uses to search for anomalous changes to voter registration databases for VoteShield.