Elizabeth Johnson, PhD

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson is the executive director and senior fellow of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, and an adjunct professor of Marketing at Wharton. Her research focuses on vision and visual behavior. Her work spans physiological approaches in the retina and early visual cortex to using eye tracking to investigate how human observers look and navigate through the world, how these processes unfold over time and with experience, and the role of social cognition and decision making in these processes. As an expert on color vision, she has collaborated with Lenovo to develop computer and tablet screens with features that provide a more personalized color experience.

Before joining Wharton in 2016, Johnson spent 14 years at Duke University, where she was on the faculty in the Neurobiology Department and served as the associate director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. She received her PhD in Neural Science at New York University and an AB in psychobiology from Mount Holyoke College. She has a long-time interest in how our perception of visual art informs how we see. She designed and is teaching a new course at Wharton on visual marketing with Professor Barbara Kahn.