Ben successfully defended his dissertation on comparative salamander physiology in November 2021! With his new preferred name, “Doc Johnson,” he and his family moved to the San Diego area. There, he spends his free time paddle boarding and questing for the area’s local herpetofauna on behalf of his son, Mateo.
Ben is now working as a bioinformatics programmer in the laboratory of Dr. Abraham Palmer at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, where he focuses on genotyping and trait prediction methods for genome-wide association studies examining addiction behaviors in rats. Ironically, Ben had to depart the Searle lab before finally pursuing mammalian genetics!
