Andrew Johnson awarded Baxter’s Young Investigator Award

Andrew "Andy" R. Johnson has been selected as a 2015 Baxter Young Investigator in recognition of his research accomplishments. This award stimulates and rewards research that can be directly used for critical care therapies and the development of medical products that save and sustain patients' lives.

Andy is entering his fifth year of graduate studies in the laboratory of Professor Erin E. Carlson in the Department of Chemistry. His research focuses on the development of new analytical and informatics tools in the study of natural products, a rich source of therapeutic agents. Specifically, he is incorporating mass spectrometry-based techniques to enable rapid characterization of unknown compounds without the need for time-intensive purification efforts, streamlining the drug discovery process.

Andy is currently focused on the incorporation of cutting-edge techniques to the structure elucidation process, namely ion mobility spectrometry, which provides information about the size and shape of molecules. Molecular modeling assists in the interpretation of these experimental results and prioritization of candidate structures for further study.

Andy received his bachelor's degree in chemistry and biochemistry, cell and molecular biology from Drake University in 2011. During his undergraduate research under Professor Mark Vitha, Andy studied the fundamentals of chromatographic selectivity. He then entered the doctorate program at Indiana University in analytical chemistry, joined the lab of Erin Carlson and began work in natural products discovery. Andy relocated to the University of Minnesota with the Carlson Group.