Simon C. Johnson

Biologist of aging and mitochondrial disease, first author with Peter Rabinovitch and Matt Kaeberlein of the 2013 Nature review that made the case for mTOR as a central controller of aging, now a professor at Northumbria University

Professor, School of Geography and Natural Sciences, Northumbria University · Assistant Professor of Neurology, University of Washington, and Principal Investigator, Center for Integrative Brain Research, Seattle Children's Research Institute (earlier) · postdoc in Genetics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine · PhD in Molecular Basis of Disease, University of Washington (2013)

School of Geography and Natural Sciences, Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom) ↗ ORCID0000-0002-1942-3674 ↗

In 2013, while a PhD student in the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington, Simon Johnson was first author of the Nature review "mTOR is a key modulator of ageing and age-related disease", with Matt Kaeberlein as senior author. The review gathered the evidence that turning down mTOR signalling, genetically or with rapamycin, extends lifespan in model organisms from yeast to mice, and that it protects against a growing list of age-related diseases in animal models. It was also frank about the problem: side effects of the existing drugs stood in the way of giving them to healthy people. The paper became a standard starting map for the field.

Johnson's own research joins aging biology to mitochondrial disease, the inherited disorders in which the cell's power plants fail. One line of work asks what mTOR inhibition does in mitochondrial disease, including how the dose of an mTOR inhibitor shapes its effects on body weight and on the disease itself. Johnson studied biochemistry and biophysics at Oregon State University, earned the PhD in Molecular Basis of Disease at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow in genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Johnson then led a laboratory as Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of Washington and Principal Investigator in the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children's Research Institute, studying the molecular and developmental mechanisms of pediatric genetic disease, mainly mitochondrial disease. Johnson is now a professor in the School of Geography and Natural Sciences at Northumbria University in Newcastle, where the research interests listed are mitochondrial disease and biology, the basic biology of anaesthesia, biogerontology and the cell and molecular basis of human genetic disease. Oregon State University gave Johnson its Young Alumni Award in 2023.

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