Biography
Dr. Norman L. Johnson is currently Deputy Group Leader of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Previously, he was Assistant to the Program Manager for Biological Threat Reduction Program Office, under Dr. I. Gary Resnick. He guided the development and execution of a diverse, multi-million chem-bio threat reduction program at Los Alamos over a three year period, in the areas including urban plume modeling, urban surveillance systems, all-threat detectors, material science, BSL-3/BLS-2 facilities, sequence databases, bioinformatics, distributed sensor networks, system studies for the development of technical and operational requirements, forensics, risk assessment, and cost/benefit analysis.
As a project manger, he has overseen projects that are challenging and many times considered to be in “too hard to do” box. Often the key to success is enabling diverse teams to break limiting barriers and discover synergistic advantages of diverse contributions.
His academic training was under Prof. R. Byron Bird in Chemical Engineering Dept. at Univ. of Wisc. His research and more than 50 publications cover a breadth of interests – including multiphase flows, inertially confined fusion, combustion modeling, self-organizing knowledge creation, diversity in collective systems, and developmental theories of evolution.
He is the recipient of a variety of honors, including a DoD Programs Award of Excellence, a DOE Award of Excellence for one of the top 23 DOE scientific projects from 1977-2000, and multiple awards by industry.
He is the founder of the Symbiotic Intelligence Project, which is an investigation into the combination of the unique abilities of the information systems such as the internet and human problem-solving to create a capability greater than the sum of the parts. He is a widely sought after speaker, providing fresh perspectives on adapting to our rapidly changing times and communicating advantages of diverse contributions to solve difficult problems.
Dance is an important part of his life, he is past President of the New Mexico Dance Coalition, a statewide non-profit organization
for the advocacy of dance
in New Mexico. In October 2003, he received an award of appreciation from Univ. of NM Dance Department for his sustained contribution to dance in New Mexico over the last decade.
Contact: norman@santafe.edu
