Richard J. Johnson, M.D. is the Tomas Berl Professor of Medicine and the Chief of the Renal Division and Hypertension at the University of Colorado since 2008. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a major in Anthropology, and a graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, he is a physician and nephrologist whose research, which has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has focused on the role of sugar, and especially fructose, in driving obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney disease. Much of this work has explored the role of fructose metabolism, especially the generation of uric acid, in driving this phenotype, and his work has included studies ranging from molecular biology, integrative physiology, and evolutionary biology. He is the author of The Sugar Fix (Rodale and Simon/Schuster, 2008) which introduced the first low fructose diet, and also The Fat Switch (Mercola.com, 2012) which explores the role of fructose in driving the obesity epidemic. He is an editor of the popular clinical textbook, Comprehensive Clinical Nephrology (Elsevier), which is now in its 5th edition, and has published over 500 scientific papers. He is listed as one of the top 250 most cited scientists by Reuters Web of Science in the field of clinical medicine from 1992 to the present. Dr. Johnson has served on multiple editorial boards. He has been on the executive council of the International Society of Nephrology and organized the scientific program for their meeting in 2011. He has lectured in over 40 countries. Special honors and awards include Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Omega Alpha, American Society of Clinical Investigation, and the American Clinical Climatologic Society.
