Justin Guthrie

Research Data Analyst

Justin Guthrie is a data scientist who applies AI and Earth observation to understand critical infrastructure and how it holds up under stress. He is a Research Data Analyst at Northeastern University’s Defense Industrial Base Institute (DIBI), a researcher in Northeastern’s Sustainability and Data Sciences (SDS) Lab and at George Mason University, and is a co-founder and GIS Lead of Enodia, an infrastructure resilience startup in Portland, Maine.

At DIBI, Justin helps design the institute’s move to a secure cloud data architecture, bringing qualitative, spatial, and quantitative data into one system. He also builds geospatial pipelines and ArcGIS StoryMaps on community readiness for industrial investment, which he carried over from his work at Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute (GRI).

His research focuses on how infrastructure fails and how those failures spread. His work includes InfraBench CLS, a global benchmark of seven Earth observation foundation models for infrastructure mapping (under review at Big Earth Data), and he is co-first author on a nationwide transmission tower detection study. He also investigated Google AlphaEarth Foundation’s precomputed embeddings in a second-author work in review at IEEE. With the NASA Disasters group, he uses satellite nighttime lights data to verify coordinated utility power shutoffs, testing whether satellites can track outages independently of utility reports.

When not working, you can find Justin at a metal show, relaxing in a cafe, or walking around in Maine’s nature.