Graduation 2014 Profiles: Bethany Johnson-Kerner

By Joseph Neighbor

Pediatric neurology can be an extremely personal, emotionally taxing—and rewarding—field. “Parents come to you, saying, ‘My child has a neurodegenerative disease. What’s going to happen to them?’” says Bethany Johnson-Kerner, a student in the MD/PhD program who received her PhD in 2012.

“These are people who generally were told there was nothing to be done for their children. And the truth is, for most questions about the brain, we can’t know the answers for sure. It’s hard to deal with the uncertainty.”

For eight years, these are the questions with which Dr. Johnson-Kerner wrestled. While working on her PhD in neuroscience, she researched giant axonal neuropathy (GAN), a rare neurodegenerative disease that appears in early childhood and leads to impaired motor function and, eventually, respiratory failure.

She joined the Project ALS lab for her PhD, and early on her lab was approached by Hannah’s Hope Fund’s Lori Sames, the mother of a child with GAN, to create a human stem cell model of the disease. The lab and collaborators worked to make the first stem cell-based model of GAN from human skin cells and showed that they could recapitulate the disease process, as well as rescue it in the dish. “Meeting families like these has had a huge impact on me,” says Dr. Johnson-Kerner.

Currently, Dr. Johnson-Kerner is interested in early brain development and neuro-immunology. She hopes to learn more about how early maternal infections affect brain development and how gene treatments can help. “The developing brain is just so interesting,” she says. “There are so many research questions that need answering.”

And the field of neurology, particularly pediatric neurology, is a small community with lots of outstanding questions. Dr. Johnson-Kerner went on 15 interviews for residency programs throughout the country, meeting many of her future colleagues. “I was able to approach it with an open mind,” she says, noting that she has extra flexibility when considering a move because her husband works from home. Of the nerve-racking residency application process? “It was fun,” she says.

In the March 21 residency match, Dr. Johnson-Kerner matched to a child neurology residency at the University of California, San Francisco.