Rachelle Johnson BS, PhD

Dr. Johnson earned her doctorate in Cancer Biology from Vanderbilt University, where she studied bone metastatic breast cancer with Drs. Gregory Mundy and Julie Sterling in the Vanderbilt Center for Bone Biology. She then relocated to Melbourne, Australia to pursue a post-doc with Drs. Natalie Sims and Jack Martin in basic bone biology in order to better understand the physiological processes of skeletal homeostasis that may impact upon tumor cells. As a postdoc in Melbourne she characterized the skeletal phenotype of several glycoprotein-130 (gp130) and SOCS3 (a gp130 downstream target) bone conditional knockout mouse models and gained experience in mouse genetics, bone histomorphometry, and microCT. She then joined Dr. Amato Giaccia’s laboratory as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University, where she returned to the bone metastasis field.

Her current work is focused on the mechanisms driving tumor cell dormancy in bone and the molecular processes that enable disseminated tumor cells to colonize the bone. In particular she is interested in the role of leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) signaling and hypoxia signaling in breast cancer dissemination and metastasis to the bone marrow.