Rate My Professor Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, holding additional faculty appointments in the Departments of Physics and Bioengineering. He is the founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, which he established in 1992 with Professor Rob MacLeod, growing it into a major center employing over 200 faculty, staff, and students before stepping down as director in 2018. Currently, he serves as co-director of the Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC). Johnson serves on several international journal editorial boards and advisory boards for national and international research centers. His career has been marked by pioneering contributions to the integration of computing, simulation, and visualization in biomedicine and other scientific domains.

Johnson's research focuses on scientific computing and scientific visualization, with particular interests in uncertainty and computational field visualization, inverse and imaging problems, machine learning, large-scale visualization, and tensor visualization. He leads the MULTI research group at the SCI Institute. Key publications include co-editing The Visualization Handbook (2005, Elsevier) and Scientific Visualization: Uncertainty, Multifield, Biomedical, and Scalable Visualization (2014, Springer). His work has earned numerous accolades, including the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award from President Clinton in 1995, the Governor's Medal for Science and Technology in 1999, the University of Utah Distinguished Professor Award in 2003, the Rosenblatt Prize in 2010, the IEEE Visualization Career Award in 2010, the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award in 2012, and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award in 2013 for outstanding contributions to high-performance computing in biomedicine. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2014), SIAM (2009), AAAS (2005), and AIMBE (2004), and was inducted into the IEEE Visualization Academy in 2019. Johnson's leadership and innovations have significantly influenced scientific visualization and computational science fields.