Assistant Professor of Food Animal Microbiome. He is originally from Missouri. Tim’s education started at Brigham Young University; he focused on soil microbiology and the role bacteria play in nutrient cycling (carbon and nitrogen) in the environment. His PhD research focused on microbial ecology in soil, animals and manure. His PhD work provided a quantitative measure of diverse impacts of in-feed antibiotics on bacterial community membership and antimicrobial resistance genes. After earning his degree, he set out on a quest for solutions to the mounting problem of antibiotic resistance. Tim found his first postdoc position at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada where he investigated antimicrobial resistance and drug discovery. In a second postdoc at the National Animal Disease Center, he used multi ’omics (metagenomics, metabolomics, metatranscriptomics, and 16S community profiling) approaches to studying the swine and turkey microbiome in efforts to find alternatives to antibiotics in animal agriculture.
Tim and Angela Johnson have 5 children – Zach, Grant, Bennett, James and Mary. As a family, they enjoy soccer, basketball, hiking, camping, swimming and running. Angela is a “semi-retired” music teacher (voice and piano). They enjoy family time outside and DIY projects.
Carmen Wickware
Carmen is a PhD student. She has a B.S. from Purdue University where she studied Food Science. As a Masters student in Food Science at Cornell University, her focus was food microbiology and safety; her thesis research was finding critical processing parameters (pH and time) for the production of safe soybean tempeh. She also has an M.S. in Bioinformatics from New York University. Follower her graduation from NYU, she worked at Virginia Tech analyzing whole genome sequences for antibiotic resistance genes from raw manure and small-scale composted manure. This was part of a much larger study looking at tracing antibiotic resistance genes and bacteria from farm-to-fork. Now as a PhD student, she would like to focus on the epidemiology of antibiotic resistance as it pertains to agriculture and finding ways to increase the disease resistance of our feed animals.
Carmen is the daughter of Marvin, Sr. and Jenifer and the younger of two children; her older brother Marvin, Jr. and his wife Beth have two children, Nathaniel and Gabriel. She enjoys biking, hiking, playing with her dog Ein, cooking, baking, going to concerts, and all types of games (video, card, board, tabletop, etc.).

Ruth Eunice Centeno
Ruth is an intern student in the Animal Sciences Department. She is originally from San Salvador, El Salvador. Ruth is a senior year student of the Agronomic Engineering Major at Zamorano University in Honduras. During her studies at Zamorano University, she worked in the areas of zootechnology, animal science, animal reproduction biotechnology, phytotechnology, horticulture, molecular diagnostic, soil management and conservation, environment and development, processing and product commercialization. Before studying at Zamorano, Ruth did a semester of Veterinary Medicine in the Alberto Masferrer University in El Salvador.
As part of her study plan from Zamorano University, she is doing an internship here at Purdue Animal Sciences in the area of food animal microbiome. She is working with chicken and swine microbiomes. She is using molecular techniques that allow her to view the changes and effects in the intestinal microbiome by the incorporation of enzymes, amino acids and other components into animal diets and how these changes affect the feed efficiency and growth performance.
After Ruth finishes her internship, she will return to Zamorano University and finish her studies.

Johanna MuurinenJohanna is a postdoc from Finland and she is especially interested in finding links between environmental resistome and "superbugs". Her scientific career path has not been the straightest but as the result she has a broad perspective in antimicrobial resistance. From 2001 to 2007 she worked as a laboratory technician at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Helsinki, Finland. She wanted to be a researcher herself and she almost started her studies at the Faculty of Pharmacy, but felt more like home in Environmental Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki. She studied agricultural properties of Biochar in her master's thesis and graduated in 2012. In 2013 she started her PhD studies in Microbiology and in the laboratory of Professor Marko Virta, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki. The original idea for her PhD project was her own and she was the first researcher studying antibiotic resistance in Finnish agroecosystems. She defended her thesis in October 2017. From April 2017 to May 2018 she worked as a researcher at the Risk Assessment Research Unit, Finnish Food Safety Authority Evira. Her task was to study the associations between antimicrobial use, farm management and observed antimicrobial resistance in the pork production chain. Johanna joined Dr. Johnson's laboratory in July 2018 and will be continuing her research on antimicrobial resistance in production animals and agroecosystems.
Johanna is also the chairperson of One Health Finland, an NGO advancing One Health approach and science communication. She has two cats and a horse in Finland. During her free time she loves to ride dressage and reading blogs about advanced statistics and artificial intelligence.