Rachelle Johnson PhD

Dr. Rachelle W. Johnson earned her doctorate in Cancer Biology from Vanderbilt University, where she studied bone metastatic breast cancer with Drs. Gregory Mundy and Julie Sterling in the Vanderbilt Center for Bone Biology. She then relocated to Melbourne, Australia to pursue a post-doc with Drs. Natalie Sims and Jack Martin in basic bone biology to better understand the physiological processes of skeletal homeostasis that may impact tumor cells. As a postdoc in Melbourne, she characterized the skeletal phenotype of several glycoprotein-130 (gp130) and SOCS3 (a gp130 downstream target) bone conditional knockout mouse models and gained experience in mouse genetics, bone histomorphometry, and micro CT. She then joined Dr. Amato Giaccia’s laboratory as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University, where she returned to the bone metastasis field. Her current research focus is on the mechanisms that regulate breast cancer progression, tumor dissemination to bone, and entry and exit from dormancy in the bone marrow, with a particular interest in the role of leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) signaling, parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP), and hypoxia signaling. She is also interested in mechanisms of drug-induced bone loss and fracture prevention in patients receiving bone-damaging cancer therapies.