Emma Johnson

As an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill majoring in biostatistics and biology, Emma loved her evolutionary and molecular genetics classes. Wanting to find a way to marry these passions with her math skills and interest in behavioral research, especially research related to substance use and mental health, she found a perfect fit in the field of behavioral genetics. She completed her PhD with Dr. Matt Keller at CU Boulder and the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (2013-2017), studying the associations between genome-wide autozygosity and complex traits, and whether popular candidate gene targets were replicated in modern GWAS. She then completed a postdoc in substance use genetics with Dr. Arpana Agrawal at Washington University School of Medicine (2017-2020). As a postdoc, Emma was an analyst for the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium's Substance Use Disorders working group and led the PGC SUD's first GWAS of cannabis use disorder (published in 2020).

Emma has been funded by NIAAA, NIDA, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and was the winner of Illumina's 2023 Polygenic Risk Scores Research Grant Contest. She applies a variety of statistical genomics methods to large-scale datasets, like the All of Us Research Program, as well as smaller, carefully phenotyped samples to better understand the genetic and biological mechanisms and environmental factors that play a role in substance use, psychiatric disorders, and other health- and behavior-related phenotypes.