Jeremiah Johnson, Ph.D.

Jeremiah Johnson, Ph.D.

University of Tennessee

Jeremiah Johnson, Ph.D., is a first-generation college graduate that received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2011 under the direction of Steven Clegg, Ph.D. During his doctoral studies, Johnson demonstrated that the type 3 fimbriae in Klebsiella pneumoniae are controlled through sensing intracellular concentrations of the second messenger, cyclic diguanylate. Following his studies, he worked as a National Institute of Health (NIH) and United States Deparment of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) fellow with Victor DiRita, Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, studying mechanisms by which Campylobacter jejuni colonizes animal hosts.

After moving with DiRita to Michigan State University for a year, Johnson started his own group at the University of Tennessee in 2016, where they focus on studying the host-microbe interface during Campylobacter infection, including the innate immune response to the bacterium, and determining these may have long-term implications for the host.