Dr. Paula A. Johnson is a cardiologist, the Executive Director of the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology and Chief of the Division of Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Johnson has built an innovative, interdisciplinary clinical, research, education, and policy program in women’s health.

The health care practice that Dr. Johnson created and leads integrates primary care with health care specialties in a learning laboratory, bringing together clinical care, research and operations to improve the health of women. The clinical care integrates leading-edge research about women’s health and serves as a basis for research focused on the discovery of mechanisms that will explain sex differences in morbidity and mortality and disorders specific to women. Under Dr. Johnson’s leadership, a robust research program focused on discovering how disease is expressed differently in women and men has grown to be the premier program nationally. Dr. Johnson established a Women’s Health Policy and Advocacy Program to guide and advocate institutional, state, and national policy on health issues of critical importance to women. She has also founded a unique training program to build leadership in women’s health globally with the first trainees to begin in the summer of 2007.

Dr. Johnson is recognized as a national expert in the area of defining and understanding the quality of cardiology care for women and minorities, with a particular research focus on understanding disparities in health care for women and minorities. She founded the Center for Cardiovascular Disease in Women at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is dedicated to developing new sex- and gender-specific strategies for prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of coronary heart disease in women.

Dr. Johnson is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. She received her MD and MPH degrees from Harvard. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she also completed a fellowship in cardiovascular disease and served as Chief Medical Resident.

Dr. Johnson is the recipient of many awards recognizing her contributions in women’s and minority health and is featured as a national leader in medicine by the National Library of Medicine. She has also received the Abigail Adams Award from the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, which honors Massachusetts’s women leaders who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to the realization of equal political, economic, and social rights for women. She has been named one of Boston’s “Top Doctors” by Boston Magazine and was featured in the Boston Globe’s “IDEAS Boston 2005” as one of twenty-four leading innovators in Massachusetts.

Dr Johnson serves on several not for profit boards including the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Greater Boston Division of the American Heart Association, and the Park School in Brookline, MA. She served for many years on the board of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts and chaired the board from 1997-1998. Dr. Johnson also serves as an independent director on the board of West Pharmaceutical Services, a global corporation that is the premier manufacturer of drug delivery systems. She serves as an overseer at the Boston’s Museum of Science and the YMCA. She lives with her husband and two children in Brookline, MA.