Alex Johnson

Dr Alex Johnson has joined Biosciences as a new independent research fellow. His research is focused on understanding the cell biology underlying plant responses to environmental stimuli and stresses; specifically, endocytosis and how it mediates growth and development. While his PhD investigated synaptic vesicle recycling in the lab of Prof. Mike Cousin (University of Edinburgh), he became interested in how eukaryotes with different protein machinery and biophysical properties completed the same cellular processes, and thus began to work with plants. He joined the groups of Dr. Christien Merrifield and Dr. Grégory Vert (CNRS-I2BC, France), and later Prof. Jiří Friml (ISTA, Austria), to investigate planta endocytosis, where he established quantitative imaging tools to directly visualise plant endocytosis at the ultrastructural, live single event, and tissue scales. Then combining these novel tools with biochemical and in vitro reconstitution assays, he uncovered that plant endocytosis is evolutionarily unique from other biological model systems and has provided many insights into its mechanisms. He then joined the lab of Dr. Kareem Elsayad (Medical University of Vienna, Austria), where he developed optical approaches to determine cellular biomechanical properties in a range of biological samples. Within Biosciences, he will combine these approaches to further investigate how endocytosis mediates plant growth and development in responses to environmental stresses, where he is excited by the many potential collaborations within Biosciences, the Living Systems Institute, and Physics.