Jolene Johnson is currently an Assistant Professor at St. Catherine University, a position she held since 2012. Johnson was attracted to both the mission of the school as a women’s college and the diversity of its students, along with the opportunity to build a physics program at the University.
As a shy child, Johnson’s desire to teach came as a surprise to her. Later, however, Johnson gained confidence working as an adjunct professor at a local Primarily Undergraduate Institution [PUI] and taking on a leadership role as the Coordinator for Women in Physics and Astronomy and as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she developed a passion for teaching. “As an instructor at a primarily undergraduate institution,” she says, “I find the most joy in working with my students. I love to see students succeed after struggling with a problem. In these small triumphs I have a front row seat to help students imagine what they can do with their lives.”
At St. Catherine’s, Johnson serves a diverse group of young women, coming from a wide range of backgrounds, many of whom are the first people in their family to go to college. Johnson strongly believes in the importance of diversity. “People can only solve the problems they see,” she says, “diversity gives an organization, company, or problem a range of different approaches and provide solutions that impact a wider range of people.”
Johnson grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, where she credits science camps - often held aboard research vessels in Lake Superior - and a great public school system for sparking an early interest in science. “In middle school,” says Johnson, “I began seeing myself as a scientist. Really a limnologist, but living near
Lake Superior you get a skewed sense of how many limnologists there are in the world…turns out there are not so many.” She was also inspired by a number of mentors and role models including an encouraging mother, supportive grandfather, and a high school physics teacher who had the class read Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Along the way, Johnson has also been blessed to find mentors like Jochen Mueller, her PI at the University of Minnesota, who taught her how to be a good scientist and pay attention to details. Mueller’s wife and senior lab scientist, Yan Chen, also provided Johnson with support and encouragement in the lab.
As an undergraduate, Johnson double majored in physics and music at Gustavus Adolphus College, continuing a passion that began around the same time her interest in science was sparked. “I love physics and music, and have for as far back as I remember. I was born and raised in Duluth, on the edge of Lake Superior. That’s where I became curious about the nature of motion,” she says, “in fifth grade, I started playing viola, which piqued my interest in the nature of sound. Physics was a way for me to explore both.” Johnson, who performs with the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, has been able to combine both these passions in the classroom through a course she developed called The Physics of Music. “I do everything I can to spark student interest and help them understand the physics at the heart of life. I use everyday items like balls and tires to demonstrate motion. I play my viola to introduce sound waves, chordal structures and how the human ear processes vibrations into pitches.”
As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where she received a PhD in physics with a focus on biophysics, Johnson focused her research on viral assembly, using the techniques of fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy and microfluidics. Her current research builds off this work to better understand the reproduction of the HIV virus. When asked to describe her research on an elementary level, Johnson explains, “First, it turns out that there are some sort of obvious things that we still don’t understand about the HIV virus. For example we know that cells will produce the HIV virus at different levels. That means, given a population of cells infected with HIV you would find a distribution in their production rates in both time and number. I want to develop tools and methods for quantifying the difference in virus production from cell to cell. I combine custom built microfluidic cell traps, fluorescence imaging and statistical analysis in my quest to build a new technique to attack this problem,” she says, “one of my interests is to determine the distribution of virus produced by cells so that in the future biologist might use this information to help them better understand the mechanisms of viral reproduction and exploit that information to work on medical treatments.”
Johnson’s work has been successful at attracting undergraduates to her lab through an opportunity to work in the world class nanofabrication facility at the University of Minnesota. She also believes that “there is something satisfying about of fabricating a microfluidic device and then attempt to quantify the burst of photons. It is also just so amazing how much we don’t know, I think that people are often surprised by that.” One piece of advice that Johnson has for her students, and those underrepresented in the field in general, is to “Go for it! Realize everyone is in the same boat. Well, maybe not the same boat. But lots of people struggle. If you are doing it right, nearly everyone struggles with physics. The white boys are not magically better at physics.”