Dr. Jeffrey A. Johnson, MS, PhD, has been with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 22 years. Currently, he is the lead of the HIV Diagnostics Team in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention (DHAP) Laboratory, overseeing three diagnostic activities in test development, surveillance and reference testing. His earlier work has spanned from examining adventitious retroviruses in live-virus vaccines to expanding a research program in HIV drug resistance diagnostics.
Presently, Dr. Johnson’s research interests are in the evolution, transmission, and persistence of HIV, implications of drug resistance, and the development of diagnostics tools to identify viral reservoirs and resolve difficult diagnoses, and involves:
- Improving testing methods to better support outreach testing in surveillance of recent HIV infection, transmitted drug resistance and transmission events under biomedical interventions
- Developing and applying sensitive clinical sampling and testing methods for identifying drug resistance and occult infection in human and preclinical animal studies involving antiretroviral interventions
- Examining early-acute HIV infection for transmission viral diversity and exploration of compartmentalized archived virus sanctuaries as evidence of variant diversity and persistence
A few of his contributions to science are:
- Pioneering sensitive resistance testing to demonstrate the high risk of HIV drug resistance in women provided single-dose nevirapine for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission
- Being the first to identify an association between minority-level transmitted drug resistance and poor treatment outcomes
- Uncovering that HIV subgenomic regions and resistance mutations provide evidence that persons can be infected with more than one HIV variant in contrast to earlier studies focusing on envelope sequences
Dr. Johnson also serves as the DHAP Laboratory Associate Chief for Science and the division Deputy Associate Director for Laboratory Science at the CDC.
