Louise Johnson educated at Wimbledon High School
Education
Johnson attended Wimbledon High School for Girls from 1952 to 1959, where girls were encouraged to study science and to pursue useful careers. Her mother had read biochemistry and physiology at University College London in the 1930s and was supportive of Johnson's decision to pursue a scientific career. She went to University College London in 1959 to read Physics and coming from an all-girls school, she was surprised to find herself one of only four girls in a class of 40.
She took theoretical physics as her third-year option and graduated with a 2.1 degree. Whilst working at the Atomic Energy Authority, Harwell, on neutron diffraction, during one of her vacations, she met Uli Arndt, an instrument scientist, who worked at the Royal Institution, London. She was impressed by the work taking place there and in 1962 she moved to the Royal Institution to do a PhD in biophysics. Her graduate supervisor was David Chilton Phillips, whose team was working on the crystal structure of lysozyme. Her first task was to determine the structure of a sugar molecule, N-Acetylglucosamine, using x-ray diffraction, which she solved within a year. She then moved onto the study of the substrate binding to the protein lysozyme and was part of the team, that discovered the structure of the enzyme lysozyme; this was the third protein structure ever solved by x-ray crystallography, and the first enzyme. She was awarded her PhD in 1965.
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