Michael Johnston, a former chief medical officer and executive vice president at the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) who trained and worked at Johns Hopkins, died July 30, 2022, of pancreatic cancer. He was 76.
Johnston is remembered as a friend, mentor and an international icon in the field of child neurology and developmental neuroscience. He also served as KKI’s Blum-Moser Endowed Chair for Pediatric Neurology and director of the Department of Neurology and Developmental Medicine until his retirement in 2019.
“He was absolutely brilliant and was the most productive in the country when it came to pediatric neurology,” Gary Goldstein, who was president and CEO of KKI from 2008 until retiring in 2018, told The Baltimore Sun. “He was so smart, and he contributed so much to the field.”
Johnston grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the son of a physician, where he went on house calls with his father. He graduated first in his medical school class at the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, then completed an internship and residency in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins. After two years with the U.S. Army Office of the Surgeon General, he returned to Johns Hopkins in 1976 for a residency in neurology. During this time, he worked in the laboratory of Joseph Coyle, where they discovered of the role of the nucleus basalis in the developing brain.
After a stint at the University of Michigan Medical School and University of Michigan Hospitals, he returned to Baltimore in 1988 to join KKI (then the Kennedy Institute) and Johns Hopkins, as a professor of neurology and pediatrics.
At KKI, he and his team focused on developing therapies to reduce brain injury in infants and children as well as to promote recovery by enhancing brain plasticity. His laboratory was one of the first to describe the mechanisms through which the neurotransmitter glutamate triggers brain injury from lack of oxygen, trauma and other insults. This work eventually led to development of neonatal cooling, a now-standard treatment of newborns in the neonatal ICU with neonatal encephalopathy, and other therapeutic approaches for Rett syndrome, traumatic brain injury and anoxic brain injury.
