Richard Slimbach

At Johns Hopkins, Richard Slimbach is a lecturer in the MS in Organizational Leadership program. His academic interests include global issues, social anthropology, urban sustainability, international development, and qualitative research.

Slimbach draws from more than three decades of experience in higher education. Founder of the impactful Global Studies program at Azusa Pacific University, now Professor Emeritus Slimbach also co-founded the MA in Transformational Urban Leadership, an innovative graduate degree focused exclusively on the world’s one billion slum dwellers. His teaching and scholarship center on the ethical, political, and ecological challenges shaping global development and leadership in an era of accelerating risk.

As an author, Dr. Slimbach has written Becoming World Wise: A Guide to Global Learning (Stylus, 2010), The Art of World Learning: Community Engagement for a Sustainable Planet (Stylus, 2019), and Global Polycrisis: Root Causes and Radical Alternatives (Routledge, 2026). His work examines the convergence of crises in energy, economy, ecology, and meaning, integrating biophysical limits, political economy, and systems-level risk analysis.

Passionate about experiential education, he finds his deepest professional satisfaction in teaching eager minds and designing place-based, experience-driven learning programs aimed at the common good. He has directed full-immersion study-and-service-away programs, enabling students to conduct community research and service-learning projects in more than 50 non-Western countries. His work has taken students to cities such as Port-au-Prince, Kolkata, Medellín, Kampala, and Manila, where they engaged with local families and grassroots organizations to foster cross-cultural understanding and social impact.

Slimbach holds a PhD in International and Comparative Education from UCLA, where his research focused on nonformal educational development among the Baloch people in Karachi, Pakistan. Outside of academic life, he enjoys reading widely, bicycle touring, and landscaping with native plants.