- Springer Nature
- United Kingdom
About Ben Johnson
I trained as a virologist, starting with an undergraduate degree in virology from the University of Warwick, UK. My PhD, in influenza virus genetics and immunoevasion, was from Public Health England and the University of Reading, UK, with Maria Zambon and Wendy Barclay. My research interests then moved to smallpox vaccines, viral ion channels and cell adhesion, while a postdoc at Imperial College London with Geoffrey Smith, FRS. I then joined open-access publisher BioMed Central in 2011 as an editor and then associate publisher and was Head of Communities & Engagement at Springer Nature from 2016, running the Nature Research Communities and other online engagement activities for researchers. I joined Nature Medicine in 2021, with responsibility for news and opinion content, and am based in the London office.
Recent Comments
Nice job Ben.
Thanks, Yossef!
Thank you for writing our first After the Paper post! It is great to see how everyone's careers progressed in the past year.
Validation of assays is not the most glamorous work, but it is so important! Well done
Many thanks for this, Ben. Constructive, clear!
In my 5th week of COVID-19 (since 2 April, we reckon) and I'm also a Behçet's Disease sufferer. Any advice? Interested in the colchicine idea at Montreal Heart Institute. Have all the symptoms of high altitude sickness NOT bronchitis or asthma (am chronic asthmatic, had bronchitis early March).
Particularly interested in your input re children - as regards my 5 and 7 year old grandsons, and the risk in their returning to school. They live in France and are due back on 11 May.
Kind regards,
Victoria
(dob 23/01/1955)
Hi Victoria, thanks for your comment and sorry to hear you are unwell. We don't give any medical advice to individuals through this community, you will have to contact your local health professionals. On children, the latest research continues to show that children usually have mild disease, which is reassuring.
This is good to hear, thanks Alicia. I will continue writing this as long as it is useful, or until the volume of papers overwhelms me!
There's a great article in the New York Times on the challenge of counting deaths from COVID-19, where they measure excess deaths https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html
It's great to see so much discussion on this post.
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Many thanks!
Obviously you girls must have been partying when the immunology class was explaining the concept of adjuvants.
This comment was highly inappropriate and clearly broke our community policy. It has been deleted.