Dr. Michelle C. Johansen, MD-PhD is a board-certified Cerebrovascular Neurologist, Associate Professor of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Associate Faculty in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. In her career as a clinician scientist, she sees patients in her own outpatient clinic, attends on the inpatient cerebrovascular wards at Johns Hopkins and specializes in the care of patients with diseases of the blood vessels of the brain and spinal cord.
Dr. Johansen focuses her research on the heart-brain connection, specifically with regard to stroke etiology, in order to allow earlier diagnosis, and ultimately prevention of embolic stroke. Dr. Johansen has already established a relationship between cardiac markers of health and brain changes in her patients at Johns Hopkins, as well as large community-based population studies. She also has been recognized for her work in understanding the vascular contributions to impaired cognition in patients with heart disease with the Vascular Cognitive Impairment Award in 2022. She receives funding for her research from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, the National Institutes of Neurologic Diseases and Stroke, the National Institute of Aging, and the Clark Family Foundation. She is the inaugural Guy McKhann Associate Professor of Neurology. Her work has been published in many high-ranking medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and she has been interviewed as a brain expert for webinars, podcasts and medical news outlets, such as CNN, and Medical News Today.
