Dr. Johnson joined Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in 2024 where she currently works as a Postdoctoral Associate in the RNA Biology department. She was first recognized by OTS with the NextGen Best Talk Award at the 2022 Annual Meeting in Phoenix, and then, she was awarded the Alan M. Gewirtz Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Students at the 2023 Annual Meeting in Barcelona. She was elected to the OTS Board of Directors as a Trainee Representative in 2023 where she serves as co-chair of the OTS Website Committee.

Krystal joined David Corey’s Lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) to pursue her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2018 after finishing her B.S. in Biochemistry at UT Austin. She was awarded a NIGMS F31 Diversity Fellowship for her proposed thesis work that aims to deepen our understanding of microRNA regulation in colon cancer model systems.

microRNAs are famous for carrying out sequence-specific silencing of complementary messenger RNAs through RNA interference in the cytoplasm, yet her thesis work expands this small RNA’s realm of regulation by exploring disease-relevant conditions where microRNAs and their protein machinery are driven into the nucleus. She has observed a striking nuclear enrichment of the essential RNA interference effector protein, Argonaute 2, in primary colon tumors compared to normal colon tissue from patients. This research can impact our understanding of intracellular regulation of RNAi factors and therapeutic targets that contribute to colon cancer progression.