Biosketch – 2017 NNRCO Launch
James D. Johnson, Ph.D.
Jim Johnson is Professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences, and the Department of Surgery at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver Canada. He is also Leader of the Life Sciences Institute Diabetes Research Group. He is co-founder of the Institute for Personalized Therapeutic Nutrition, a non-profit that seeks to translate his studies on hyperinsulinemia into personalized therapeutic nutrition guidelines. He was recently appointed inaugural Director of the Novo Nordisk Research Centre in Oxford, a new hybrid academic-industry Institute that will focus on the fundamental biology of type 2 diabetes. In Oxford, he is a Senior Fellow at Harris-Manchester College.
He started his independent laboratory at UBC in 2004, after a post-doctoral fellowship on diabetes research with Ken Polonsky and Stan Misler at Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD training on pituitary physiology with John Chang at the University of Alberta. A world-leader in the fundamental biology of pancreatic islets, insulin action, diabetes and related conditions, he is the author of >115 peer-reviewed articles since 2000. His research has been published in prestigious journals including Cell Metabolism, Nature Communications, PNAS, Diabetes, and Diabetologia. Prof. Johnson is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Islets, and on the Editorial Boards of Diabetes and Endocrinology. He is dedicated to training the next generation of scientists, with several who are now successful professors or senior scientists. Prof. Johnson was named the top research under 45 by the Canadian Diabetes Association in 2016, and has held grants and scholarships from this agency and others. Jim is actively involved in outreach and science-related discourse on Twitter @JimJohnsonSci.