Abigail Johnson, PhD

My research explores the relationships between diet and the human gut microbiome in health and disease using novel computational methods for dietary data. My current focus areas include 1) analysis of diet and microbiome after dietary interventions, 2) methods development for dietary data analysis and visualization, and 3) understanding the interactions between foods, microbes, and fungi during different stages of development. I am interested in exploring how diet and the microbiome interact to influence chronic diseases including prediabetes, diabetes, and cancer.

Select publications

See a full list of publications on Google Scholar and PubMed

1. Johnson, A. J., Zheng, J. J., Kang, J. W., Saboe, A., Knights, D., & Zivkovic, A. M. (2020). A guide to diet-microbiome study design. Frontiers in Nutrition, 7, 79. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2020.00079.
2. Leeming, E., Johnson, A., Spector, T., & Le Roy, C. (2019). Effect of diet on the gut microbiota: Rethinking intervention duration. Nutrients, 11(12).
3. Langsetmo, L., Johnson, A., Demmer, R., Fino, N., Orwoll, E., Ensrud, K., . . . (2019). The association between objectively measured physical activity and the gut microbiome among older community dwelling men. J Nutr Health Aging, 23(6), 538-546.
4. Johnson, A., Vangay, P., Al-Ghalith, G., Hillmann, B., Ward, T. L., Shields-Cutler, R. R., . . . Knights, D. (2019). Daily sampling reveals personalized diet-microbiome associations in humans. Cell Host Microbe, 25(6), 789-802.
5. Vangay, P., Johnson, A., Ward, T., Al-Ghalith, G., Shields-Cutler, R., Hillmann, B., . . . Knights, D. (2018). US immigration westernizes the human gut microbiome. Cell