Christopher J. Johnson

Christopher J. Johnson received his B.S. in Physics from Butler University in 2005 and his Ph.D. in Physics from University of California, San Diego in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Robert Continetti. In 2011, he received an NSF American Competitiveness in Chemistry fellowship for postdoctoral work under Prof. Mark Johnson at Yale University. He joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University in the fall of 2014, where he built a research program with two main thrusts: to understand the mechanisms by which particles form out of thin air in Earth’s atmosphere and to understand and control the fundamental properties of small metal nanoclusters. These efforts required the development of home-built instruments to determine the structures and fundamental properties of nanoscale objects and accompanying custom data acquisition and analysis software. For his independent work, he has been recognized with an Air Force Young Investigator Award and a Department of Energy Early Career Award as well as the Flygare Award at the International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy and the JPCA and PHYS Division Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society. As an educator at Stony Brook, he developed a course introducing problem solving for chemistry students using computer programming that serves as a partial basis for this book. He enjoys cooking and boating around Long Island.