Crystal C. Watkins Johansson

Crystal C. Watkins Johansson is an American neuroscientist and psychiatrist and associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as the director of the Sheppard Pratt Memory Clinic in Neuropsychiatry in Baltimore, Maryland. Johansson was the first Black female Meyerhoff Scholar to obtain an MD/PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. During her MD/PhD she developed a novel treatment for gastrointestinal in patients with diabetes that led to a patent for a pharmacological compound in 2000. Johansson is a practicing neuropsychiatrist with a focus on geriatric psychiatry and she conducts brain imaging research as well as research on cancer in African American women.

Early life and education Johansson was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She wanted to become a doctor from a young age. She attended public school in Baltimore City and became the first Black president of the student government at Dulaney High School in Cockeysville. She was supported by the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program which is a competitive program that funds the undergraduate degrees of underrepresented minorities at UMBC. She majored in biological sciences and was interested in diabetes research since her grandmother had diabetes. Johansson graduated in 1995 with a Bachelors of Science. During her PhD training, she worked in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience under the mentorship of Solomon H. Snyder, whom she met as an undergraduate at UMBC. She became a Society for Neuroscience Fellow, an Academic Medicine Fellow of the National Medical Fellowships and Bristol-Myers Squibb Inc. She found that in mouse models of diabetes, there is a significant reduction in neuronal nitric oxide synthase mRNA and that insulin treatment restores the nNOS levels. Johansson was also one of only three Black women at the time to graduate with a doctorate in molecular and cellular neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed her Internship at Sinai Hospital at Johns Hopkins in 2004, and then went on to complete her residency training in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in 2008. During her residency, she became the Chief Resident of Psychiatry She then completed a fellowship in Mood Disorders and Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins in 2009. On the clinical side, Johansson volunteers with the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program which educated high school students, teachers, and parents about adolescent depression. WYPR, Science Magazine, and ConscienHealth.

HIV/AIDs medical service and research Johansson has been committed to educating communities and patients about HIV/AIDs prevention as well as conducting research on the psychological and neurological complications of the various stages of infection. She worked with the Ministry of Health in Ghana to implement HIV/AID health education and prevention programs. Based on the infection of glial cells in patients with HIV, Johansson has also conducted studies exploring the extent of neuroinflammation in patients with HIV using Positron Emission Tomography with the PET ligand TSPO. The positive signal associated with the TSPO ligand is thought to be correlated with increased glial cell activation. She also explores how psychiatric or psychological dysfunction relates to cancer and systemic disease progression and recovery, with a focus on African American women, who are understudied in clinical research. She has found that African American women with breast cancer and undergoing chemotherapy treatment benefit from comprehensive psychological care programs in terms of coping capacity and distress associated with disease.

Awards and honors

1992-1995 Meyerhoff Scholar 2004 Outstanding Intern of the Year JHUSOM 2012 named Top 100 Women in Maryland 2016 Levi Watkins Inaugural Keynote Lecturer 2019 name Health Care Hero by the Daily Record 2019 name Physician of the Year by the Daily Record