Even at a young age, Kate Johnson was encouraged to play and explore the world around her. She quickly found that science was a way to ask questions about the world she observed.
It wasn’t a seamless path into a scientific career—she took chemistry in high school and hated it—but when she began conducting biochemistry research at Middlebury College as an undergraduate, she understood the excitement and creativity afforded by the scientific process—generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and troubleshooting when things went wrong. She eventually re-took chemistry and found joy in relearning the material, connecting pieces of the puzzle that hadn't made sense the first time around.
And when she spent a summer at the University of Colorado working with a PhD student in a lab, she saw a potential future. “I loved the way he approached his project and structured his days,” she said. “That was a turning point for me. I thought, ‘This could be me.”
After college, she spent two years as a research technician at a small biotech company before applying to PhD programs. She received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support her graduate research and chose the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) because of its immunoengineering focus.
Now, in the lab of Assoc. Prof. Nicolas Chevrier, she studies adjuvants—molecules added to vaccines that help notify the immune system to pay attention to the vaccine. Taking a systems biology approach, she’s studying what happens when two or three adjuvants are given with a vaccine, at the level of mRNA translation – a process in cells which yields proteins.
“We want to use this information to engineer more effective vaccines and cell therapies,” she said. Complementing her lab work is her research in computational biology, where she analyzes the effects of these combinations.
“Kate is a very talented researcher with the rare capacity to do very well in both experimental and computational sciences” said Assoc. Prof. Nicolas Chevrier. “It’s been a joy to witness her grow into such a strong scientist over the past few years.”
At her disposal are all the support and resources that UChicago offers. “The fact that I can run RNA sequencing whenever I want has transformed the questions I can ask and the speed at which I can move in my research,” she said.
Those resources also extend to health resources. When she first began graduate school, she used her student health benefits to find a therapist. “Early on in your PhD, it can get frustrating really quickly,” she said. “You start projects from the ground up, and you spend a lot of time getting negative data. You’re doing something that nobody has done before, and there’s no right answer. Having that mental health support really helped me.”
Outside the lab, Johnson has taken part in UChicago PME’s Science Communications program, where she helped create immunology content for high school students and did a Junior Science Café for middle school students. After graduation, Johnson hopes to go back to the biotech industry, using the lab and computational skills she learned at UChicago.
For now, she is working on finishing her scientific manuscript to submit to journals, while taking breaks to grab coffee and swim with her lab mates. “There’s a really unique and special community that is growing up alongside UChicago PME,” she said. “It’s a wonderful environment to do research.”