Heath Johnson

Heath Johnson is an engineer-turned-biologist and microscopist who studies cell signaling. He completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Tennessee before going on to do his master’s and Ph.D. at North Carolina State University in chemical engineering. There he performed his doctoral work on signaling and cytoskeletal interactions during cell migration in the lab of Jason Haugh. After completing his Ph.D., he joined Jared Toettcher’s lab in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and was awarded an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship. In collaboration with Stas Shvartsman’s lab he worked to understand how Erk signaling regulates cell fates with optogenetics using the early fly embryo as a model system. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong in 2022.

Education

• Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, North Carolina State University (2015)
  
• M.S., Chemical Engineering, North Carolina State University (2010)
  
• B.S., Chemical Engineering, The University of Tennessee (2008)

Teaching areas

• Cell Biology
• Quantitative Biology
• Image analysis

Research interests

• Cell signaling
• Developmental Biology
• Optogenetics
• Cell Migration
• Synthetic Biology