LanceJohnson

Dr. Johnson didn’t know he wanted to be a scientist until college, and science wasn’t his initial field of study. He actually earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

While there, thanks to what he calls “dumb luck,” he got a summer job as an entry-level lab technician, washing lab glassware and performing other basic tasks.

To his surpise, he was immediately hooked. “I absolutely loved being in that environment,” he says. He went on to get a PhD in molecular and cellular pathology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Despite the career switch, Dr. Johnson still uses his journalism skills in research. His byline graces scientific publications. His writing skills come in handy when it’s time to submit large grants. He has written countless lectures and presentations.

“I think people underestimate how much of science is communication,” he says.

By running a lab, Dr. Johnson has gained another unexpected job. Essentially, he’s a small business owner. Dr. Johnson has about 10 members in his lab at a time, and that team includes staff, PhD candidates, and undergraduate students who stop in for early exposure to research.

“In a lab, you’re dealing with a lot of people. You’re also bringing in grant money. We need equipment and supplies. We pay our people,” Dr. Johnson said. “Suddenly, you’re in charge of a small business.”

Among the big moments in a researcher’s career is a successful grant submission. Around three times per year, the NIH announces a cycle of funding. Dr. Johnson, his lab, and his colleagues experience the thrill of possibly obtaining one of those coveted grants.

That NIH grant application is extensively reviewed by a committee of peers, scored, and ranked. Labs log in to find out if they meet the top percentage to get funding.

“Everyone is freaking out hitting refresh, refresh, refresh until the score is posted,” Dr. Johnson says.

Then the score posts.

And if you’re under the funding cut-off line, while funding is not yet guaranteed, “it’s party time.”

The Johnson Lab was part of multiple ongoing NIH grant-funded projects this year, which could provide important foundational information for future clinical trials. These include:

• A five-year, National Institutes of Aging (NIA)-funded project, beginning in 2022, that is working to determine whether neuropathological deficits can be rescued by switching from a high-risk allele (E4) to a protective allele (E2) of the APOE gene.
• A five-year translational project from the NIA looking into the E2 allele and cerebral energy substrate balance.
• A five-year award from the NIA for a collaborative project with Sarah Cohen, PhD, from UNC to test the function of APOE in the fat metabolism of brain cells called astrocytes and microglia.

Alongside Josh Morganti, PhD, a colleague at Sanders-Brown, and Scott Gordon, PhD, a colleague in the UK College of Medicine Department of Physiology, Dr. Johnson also earned an Alzheimer’s Association grant to study the replacement of the peripheral E4 allele with E2 and test the effect on Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.

Another very rewarding part of the job is publishing a paper about results from grant-funded projects. To a journalism graduate like Dr. Johnson, it’s particularly gratifying.

“Publications include rounds of revisions, critiques, and oftentimes, years of experiments and hours and hours and hours of writing,” Dr. Johnson says. “When that’s finally published in a beautiful printed format, that’s a really cool feeling.”

The papers and grants bring personal fulfillment. But Dr. Johnson enjoys the academic component most of all. He gets to see his students evolve as scientists, completing experiments, analyzing data, and then being excited for the result, especially when that result is unexpected.

This year, he is working on “a five-year paper in the making” with the help of his close collaborator, Dr. Morganti, and led by graduate student Lesley Golden.

“When my students get to the point where they’re independent, having their own ideas, designing their own experiments… that’s pretty cool,” he says.

Besides his home and his lab, Dr. Johnson’s most frequently visited destination this year was Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Ky.

He believes that a key catalyst for discovery is seeing new places and meeting new people. One of his favorite components of the job is the amount of traveling he gets to do, whether that’s spreading knowledge through lectures, attending conferences as an attendee, or taking an adventurous family vacation.

He can count 15 trips this year alone off the top of his head.

In the summer of 2023, Dr. Johnson took his students to Amsterdam for the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

Two of his graduate students, Lesley Golden and Nick Devanney (who graduated in December 2023), were invited to give talks in front of more than 1,000 people in-person and online.

“It was a huge deal for them, me, and the lab,” Dr. Johnson says.

From across the world to within his own office, Dr. Johnson’s job has connected him to incredible students, well-regarded colleagues, and lifelong friends.

Just next door to his office is fellow Alzheimer’s disease researcher Shannon Macauley, PhD, who joins Dr. Johnson and Dr. Morganti for a biweekly joint lab meeting. That collaboration advances groundbreaking discoveries.

For example, Dr. Johnson joined Dr. Morganti to create innovative and interactive datasets visually showing APOE’s role in Alzheimer’s disease pathology. The two scientists have worked together on a number of projects over the past year. Dr. Johnson credits his scientific collaborations with Dr. Morganti, as well as other researchers, as the foundation to his lab’s progress.

“I tell my students, there are different ways to have success in science. You can get really good at a technique or two, or just be good at making friends and finding people to help you,” Dr. Johnson says.

Dr. Johnson loves his job, and that excitement has been passed down to his two kids.

He jokes that his 7-year-old daughter trusts him now more than ever. “She’ll say, ‘Well, Dad’s a scientist, so he must be right.”

The culmination of all Dr. Johnson’s hard work is not solely represented in the amount of grant funding he receives, the papers he gets published, or his presentations. To him, it’s the students who graduate and go off into the real world becoming stellar physicians and scientists, or writers and analysts.

Those trainees are the next generation of problem-solvers who are going to shape the future for his children.

“It’d be really cool if by the time my kids are that prime age for Alzheimer’s disease, that the disease didn’t really exist, or at least, we would have helped make it extremely rare,” he says.

Having worked at UK for nearly seven straight years, Dr. Johnson knows his University is capable of not only finding solutions, but training exceptional future scientists to build off of that research.

“The resources here are top-notch. There have been very few things that I wanted to do here that there wasn’t somebody or something here that can make it happen,” he says.

“UK can make it happen.”