Curtis Johnson honored by Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials

Curtis Johnson, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Delaware, has been selected for the 2019 Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials Early Career Researcher Award. He received the award at the 8th International Conference on Mechanics of Biomaterials & Tissues in Hawaii, held from December 15 to 19, 2019.

This award recognizes early career researchers working in the field of interest of the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials. Johnson is an expert in brain magnetic resonance elastography, a non-invasive imaging technique that pairs magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, with vibration waves to study the brain. These studies are used to uncover new insights about the brain in a variety of populations, from children with cerebral palsy to healthy adolescents to multiple sclerosis patients to healthy older people and more.

In September, a paper from Johnson’s laboratory, titled Reliable preparation of agarose phantoms for use in quantitative magnetic resonance elastography, appeared in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials. In the paper, Johnson and co-authors described a protocol and model to determine the stiffness of tissue-mimicking materials used in brain magnetic resonance elastography.

Johnson is an affiliated faculty member in the mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, psychological and brain sciences, biomechanics and movement science departments at UD and the biomedical research department at Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children.

Johnson received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech in 2007 and a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013. He has been named a Junior Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and received the Young Investigator Award at the IEEE EMBS BRAIN Grand Challenges conference.

In 2019, he received two R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health, together totaling more than $5 million, to study mechanical integrity of mechanical systems in mild cognitive impairment and high-resolution anisotrophic magnetic resonance elastography of the brain.