Stephen Albert Johnston PhD

Stephen Johnston is currently the director for the Center for Innovations in Medicine (CIM) at The Biodesign Institute and a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is also the director of the Biological Design Graduate Program. The center and Professor Johnston's current work focuses on innovative solutions to fundamental problems in biomedicine. The center is unique in that it has brought together a group of interdisciplinary scientists who first identify a problem, analyze the physical economy basis of the related issues and then come up with an inventive solution.

Professor Johnston has experience in basic science, notably first cloning the Gal4 gene, showing that proteins have separable functional domains, and discovering the AAA proteins and their role in transcription. His focus now is in translational sciences and technology development. He was co-inventor/innovator of pathogen derived resistance, organelle transformation, the gene gun, genetic immunization, TEV protease system, expression library immunization, linear expression elements, synbodies and immunosignaturing.