Richard Johnson

About

Rick Johnson is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a core member of the Bio-Strategy and Leadership initiative for a secure, flourishing, and democratic biofuture. He also serves as chairman of the OECD/BIAC Science, Technology, and Innovation Committee and Australia’s Synthetic Biology Centre of Excellence; cochair of the Global Forum on Engineering Biology; and member of the new OECD Global Forum on Technology and the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council.

Johnson’s expertise and interests are at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation policy, with a focus on synthetic biology and engineering biology and next-generation biotechnology; research and innovation policies for emerging technologies; national security; and translating pre-competitive research into impact.

Johnson is the founder of Global Helix LLC, a thought leadership and policy strategy firm for emerging technologies. He serves as a director for the iGEM Foundation, BioMADE (the US Manufacturing Innovation Institute for bio industrial manufacturing and design), the BioBricks Foundation, and the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC).

Johnson was previously a senior partner at Arnold & Porter in Washington, DC. He served for many years on the MIT Corporation Committee; on various technology and law projects of the American Enterprise Institute; as chairman of the Brown University Biology and Medicine Council; and on numerous technology, security, and innovation task forces.

He has been a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, serving on its Board on Life Sciences as well as numerous committees on emerging technologies, science, and security, and coauthoring several high-impact reports.

Johnson received his JD degree from the Yale Law School, where he was editor of the Yale Law Journal, his MS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a National Science Foundation National Fellow, and his AB undergraduate degree, with highest honors (Phi Beta Kappa), from Brown University.