Michael D. L. Johnson, originally from Chicago, earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Duke University. After a brief stint as a technician in the laboratory of Dr. Jeff Frelinger, he joined Dr. Matthew Redinbo’s group earning his PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he studied mechanisms of bacterial motility and attachment. Michael then began his postdoctoral fellowship at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in January of 2012 under Dr. Jason Rosch in the Department of Infectious Diseases. There, he studied how Streptococcus pneumoniae, a causative agent of pneumonia, meningitis, and ear infections, processes metals to survive. In January of 2015, he began his second postdoctoral fellowship working in the Department of Immunology under Dr. Douglas Green where he studied LC3-associated phagocytosis, a method hosts use to get rid of pathogens or dead cells. While at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and with a passion for scientific outreach, Michael developed a podcast called Science Sound Bites, which serves as a easily transportable and accessible resource to teachers and their students designed to give real world scientific applications to classrooms that don’t always have access to them. Currently, Michael is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunobiology at the University of Arizona. There he studies the orchestrated bacterial response to metal stress using copper as a focal point.