Dr Johnson has more than 40 years of academic and research experience in health and environmental economics. He has served on the faculties of universities in the United States, Canada, and Sweden, as Distinguished Fellow at Research Triangle Institute, and currently as Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences and Department of Medicine, Duke School of Medicine, as well as appointments in the Center for Health Measurement and the Duke Clinical Research Institute. As a staff member in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental economics research program during the 1980s, Dr Johnson helped pioneer development of nonmarket valuation techniques. These methods are now widely used in federally mandated regulatory impact studies, for estimating the value of improved health outcomes, and for quantifying patients’ tolerance for treatment-related risks.

Dr Johnson has over 140 publications in books and peer-reviewed journals. His research has been published in numerous medical, health-economics, environmental-economics, and general-economics journals. He has coauthored a book on techniques for using existing environmental and health value estimates for policy analysis. He led the first FDA­sponsored study to quantify patients’ willingness to accept benefit-risk tradeoffs for new health technologies. The study was used to inform recent FDA guidance on submitting patient-preference data to support regulatory reviews of medical devices. His current research involves quantifying patients’ willingness to accept side­effect risks in return for therapeutic benefits and estimating general time equivalences among health states.

In 2018 the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research awarded him the Donabedian Outcomes Research Lifetime Achievement Award.  He is a founding member of the International Academy of Health Preference Research.  He currently serves on the editorial board for The Patient, the External Environmental Economics Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the ISPOR Health Science Policy Council.