Rate My Professor Johanna Kenyon

Associate Professor Johanna Kenyon is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences at Griffith University. She leads the Bacterial Polysaccharides Research laboratory, where her research focuses on the sugary structures on bacterial surfaces, particularly the capsular polysaccharides and lipooligosaccharides of Acinetobacter baumannii, a multidrug-resistant nosocomial pathogen. Kenyon utilizes genomics, glycomics, and microbiology to investigate biosynthesis gene clusters, structures, and diversity, contributing to bioinformatics tools like Kaptive for in silico antigen typing and genomic surveillance.

Kenyon completed her PhD in microbiology at the University of Sydney in 2012. She held a postdoctoral position in the School of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Sydney from 2012 to 2015, followed by a role as Lecturer in Bioinformatics in the School of Biomedical Sciences at Queensland University of Technology from 2015 to 2023. Her scholarship comprises over 105 publications and more than 2,699 citations. Key works include "Variation in the complex carbohydrate biosynthesis loci of Acinetobacter baumannii genomes" (PLoS One, 2013), "Identification of Acinetobacter baumannii loci for capsular polysaccharide (KL) and lipooligosaccharide outer core (OCL) synthesis" (Microbial Genomics, 2019), "An update to the database for Acinetobacter baumannii capsular polysaccharide locus typing" (Microbial Genomics, 2022), "Structure of the K2 capsule associated with the KL2 gene cluster of Acinetobacter baumannii" (Glycobiology, 2014), and "Five decades of genome evolution in the globally distributed, extensively antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii global clone 1" (Microbial Genomics, 2016). Awarded the ARC Future Fellowship (FT230100400) in 2023, she also serves as Chair of the Queensland Branch of the Australian Society for Microbiology. Her research informs strategies against antibiotic resistance, vaccine development, and pathogen diagnostics.