Kristin Burnum-Johnson, Ph.D

Dr. Kristin Burnum-Johnson is a senior scientist and an expert with the Biomolecular Pathways Integrated Research Platform. Burnum-Johnson earned her PhD in Biochemistry from Vanderbilt University with Professor Richard M. Caprioli and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at PNNL with Dr. Richard D. Smith.
Critical challenges in systems biology, ranging from environmental sustainability to human health, may be addressed through the comprehensive and informative view of underlying biological pathways provided by the integration of spatiotemporal multi-omic measurements (i.e., proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics). Her research is dedicated to achieving transformative molecular-level insights into environmental and biomedical systems by implementing advanced mass spectrometry (MS) instrumentation. Burnum-Johnson has over a decade of experience and more than 50 publications dedicated to the development and evaluation of in situ imaging MS, structural characterization of molecules using ion mobility-MS, and analyses of molecules in complex matrices using high-resolution MS. Her research program is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program, the DOE Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Burnum-Johnson was selected to receive a 2019 Early Career Research Program Award from DOE’s Office of Science. As part of her DOE BER early career research program, she is applying a multi-omics approach to uncover the mechanisms that drive cooperative fungal-bacterial interactions that result in the degradation of lignocellulosic plant material in natural ecosystems. Insights obtained from these studies inform new strategies for producing advanced bioproducts and biofuels.