Fellows : Director Bio

Marie Johnson, Ph.D.  Medical Devices Center Fellows  Program Director

Marie Johnson is the director of the University of Minnesota Medical Device Innovation Fellows Program. This appointment follows the completion of her third post-doctoral fellowship in the Stanford Biodesign Program on Stethoscopes during which she applied voice recognition signal processing techniques to auscultation and studying hemodynamics and arterial elasticity.

She received her B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan. She worked as an engineer and manager for General Motors Corporation for twelve years in a variety of manufacturing and research and development positions for the brake (Dayton, Ohio) and wheel spindle bearing (Sandusky, Ohio) divisions. Her work at GM included multiple leadership positions such as assembly line and skilled trades supervision, budget responsibilities, and multiple large scale ($1.5M) project manager positions. She acted as chairman of the board of a NSF Industrial Advisory Board at the University of Connecticut, Center for Grinding Research. Additional research responsibilities included: lean manufacturing, high precision metal finishing, machine design and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Johnson completed her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Dr. Johnson has patents and patents pending in the United States, Europe and Taiwan in acetabular joint fixation, cardiac auscultation to analyze and diagnose heart sounds using signal processing methods, a powdered metal-based pressure indicator, noninvasive method to detect coronary artery disease, stroke detection, new fetal monitoring techniques and noninvasive detection of atrial fibrillation.