Joy Johnson (university administrator)

Joy Louise Johnson () is the 10th President and Vice-Chancellor of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. A health scientist and researcher in gender and health, she became the first woman to be appointed Vice-President Research at Simon Fraser in 2014. 
Academic work and life.
Johnson graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Nursing from the University of Alberta in 1993. She worked as a nurse at St. Paul's Hospital and other facilities before returning to graduate school.
From 2003 to 2007, she was the University of British Columbia (UBC) Unit Director, Centre for Addictions Research of BC. From 2008 to 2014, she was the Scientific Director for the Institute of Gender and Health of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Johnson held a professorship in the University of British Columbia, School of Nursing, with a focus on health promotion and health behaviour change. Johnson served on the boards of the Women's Health Research Institute, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, and Innovate BC.
In 2014, she became Simon Fraser University's first female Vice President of Research, succeeding Mario Pinto. In 2020, she was appointed to succeed Andrew Petter as President of the university.
Research program.
Johnson’s research program is geared toward promoting health and modifying health-related behaviour.
Her program highlights the need to integrate sex and gender differences in research design. In particular, women and men exhibit different health behaviours and react differently to drugs and other therapies. Medical devices or other equipment physically fit the sexes differently. Ignoring these differences compromises treatment quality.
One reason for ignoring sex differences in drug therapies, for example, is the standard of controlling for extraneous variables such as hormones. This is done in order to attribute health changes to the drug being tested. Because female hormones fluctuate more than do males’, experiments typically use male subjects. The obvious problem is that we then have comparatively little data about how women respond to the same drug therapies, which compromises women’s health.
Johnson’s solution for researchers of any health area is to ask how sex and gender affect the issue in question. The goal of this approach is to improve the quality of health research and in turn quality of life regardless of sex or gender.