Richard A. Johnson, JD, MS

Biography

Rick Johnson’s current interests involve synthetic biology and the engineering of biology, brain sciences and neurobiology, next-generation infrastructure and standards for the life sciences and biomedicine, innovative global collaborations in the life sciences, and the science-innovation nexus.

Rick is a member of the Board on Life Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS); serves as a core member of the new NAS Synthetic Biology Forum; and co-chairs several NAS initiatives related to neuroscience and data, next-generation genomics infrastructure, and innovation and convergence in the bioeconomy. He also serves as: the Chairman of the OECD/BIAC Science & Technology Committee, Chairman of the Brown Biology & Medicine Council, the Stanford BioFab and Stanford bioengineering initiative; and the international advisory councils at Imperial College (UK), the Karolinska Institute, Kyoto University, and several American research universities.

Johnson is the CEO and founder of Global Helix LLC, a thought leadership and strategic positioning firm. After 30 years, Rick retired as Senior Partner at Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington, D.C., where he represented many of the leading research universities, high growth companies, and foundations. He created a number of path-breaking university-industry collaborations and pre-competitive consortia; helped to enable the growth of several new technologies and flagship innovations; and developed proactive policy and legal strategies for research, innovation, intellectual assets, and global science.

In addition to receiving his Juris Doctor degree from the Yale Law School where he was Editor of the Yale Law Journal, he received his M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a National Science Foundation National Fellow, and his undergraduate degree with highest honors from Brown University.