Jennifer Johnson

Dr. Jennifer E. Johnson is a Research Associate in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. She is broadly interested in physiological processes, and particularly in photosynthesis and respiration–from how they work at a molecular level to how to monitor their aggregate global activity.

Dr. Johnson's current projects are focused on developing integrated instrumentation for experimental studies of photosynthesis in higher plants, and a multi-scale model of photosynthesis that couples radiative fluxes, including solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, to trace gas fluxes. Both of these lines of work aim to strengthen the scientific toolkit for understanding the state of the global carbon cycle, diagnosing the poise of carbon-climate feedbacks, and forecasting the future dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere.

Dr. Johnson received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Stanford University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Bing-Mooney Fellow in Environmental Science and Conservation. She holds a BA in Biology from Swarthmore College, where she was a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar and Morris K. Udall Scholar. Her research has been recognized with the Dwight Billings Award for Physiological Ecology from the Ecological Society of America and a New (Early Career) Investigator award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.