Alumna Yuliya Johnson helps keep her adopted country safe from pandemics, bioterrorism
by Tim O’Bryhim
In early 2020, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Yuliya Johnson ’09 landed her dream job: running her own molecular microbiology laboratory in the pathology department at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
A scant three months later, she and her lab were smack dab in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We were the testing center for anyone coming to the hospital for treatment, and we also supported the whole national capital region. It was a busy, high-stress situation for a few years,” Johnson said, “but honestly, an insanely incredible experience, too.”
Her path to both the military and microbiology started shortly after she and her family immigrated from Lithuania to Staten Island in August 2001, when she was 12 years old. The following month, on 9/11, Johnson’s concerns switched to more than just learning English.Â
“We had been in New York for just a month at the time,” Johnson said. “It makes you become part of the community a lot faster than you expected you would be — and then wanting to give back to the country that took us in, that was part of it.”
That desire to give back would eventually lead her to the Navy. But another associated event piqued her curiosity about microbiology.
“The anthrax attacks of 2001 ended up fueling a lot of my interest, career-wise, later on,” she said.
Young Johnson became intrigued with the process of responding to, identifying and stopping bioterror attacks. Finishing high school at the age of 16, she headed to Wagner, where professor Kathleen Bobbitt’s Microbiology 200 cemented her interest in that field.
“Microbes are cool! I never learned about them in so much detail: how they caused disease and what kind of effect they have on people and the environment. I was hooked. I didn’t look back,” Johnson said.
After graduating from Wagner with a B.S. in microbiology, Johnson earned a master of public health degree in infectious disease and microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh, and then a Ph.D. in emerging infectious disease at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Since October 2021, Johnson has been practicing her twin passions of microbiology and biosecurity at the Naval Medical Research Command in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she leads the Agile Vaccines and Therapeutics Department.
It is there that Johnson can make real her youthful dreams of stopping epidemics from impacting the civilians and servicemembers of her adopted country. Her department focuses on developing vaccines and therapeutic countermeasures against infectious diseases like dengue fever and Covid.Â
The old problem of malaria is also a focus of the lab. Johnson and her team are working to develop a vaccine that works for people like the troops who deploy overseas.
“We have servicemembers and warfighters who serve all over the world. They encounter pathogens we don’t normally see in the United States,” Johnson said, “and these are pathogens that can cause disease and, potentially, mortality, so we need to be able to protect them.”
With a resume like Johnson’s, she’s exactly the right person to do it.
