Jeremiah Goulka, JD ​

Senior Fellow and Director of Climate and Public Safety 

jeremiah@northeastern.edu

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Jeremiah Goulka is the founder and director of the Climate and Public Safety (CAPS) project at the Action Lab at Northeastern University School of Law, where he is also a senior fellow. He created CAPS to help the U.S. criminal justice system prepare for the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. CAPS leverages his extensive experience working with public safety and criminal justice agencies, conducting research, developing policy, and delivering training to improve their operations and health. 

 

From 2019 to 2025, he was the executive director of the Lab’s SHIELD Training Initiative, an evidence-based, peer-led occupational safety and health training program providing police, first responders, and criminal justice personnel strategies to improve their occupational health and safety, while also improving community health and public safety. He led its growth to a national training program; served as PI, Co-PI, and Co-I on over $2 million of federally-funded projects; and collaborated on numerous peer-reviewed publications. 

 

Prior to joining the Action Lab, Goulka led research projects for several federal and local agencies at the RAND Corporation, where he was a member of the RAND Center for Quality Policing and a professor of criminal justice policy in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he served as executive director and co-creator (with the U.S. Attorney and a Coast Guard admiral) of a joint local-state-federal task force that facilitated rebuilding and improving the New Orleans region’s criminal justice systems. He began his career as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and clerk to a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Bowdoin College and law degrees from the universities of Chicago and Edinburgh.