Phyllis T. Johnson
American parasitologist, virologist and marine biologist
Phyllis Truth Johnson (born August 8, 1926) is an American parasitologist, virologist, and marine biologist.
Education
Phyllis T. Johnson studied zoology at the University of California, Berkeley and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1948. During her doctoral studies she studied a collection of South American fleas at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. However, during this time she also worked for six months during the Korean War to investigate an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever among U.S. soldiers caused by Hantaviruses. In 1954, the University of California, Berkeley awarded her a doctorate in parasitology. Her doctoral thesis (‘A classification of the Siphonaptera of South America’) was published in 1957 by the Entomological Society of Washington.
Entomology
From 1955 to 1958, Johnson worked as curator of the collection of lice and fleas at the Department of Agriculture museum, (later renamed the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History). She described over a dozen new species of fleas infesting hosts from North and South American. Already in 1954 Johnson published a study on the isolation and culture of Rickettsia (orientia) tsutsugamushi, the causative agent of tsutsugamushi fever transmitted by trombidiform mites. From 1959-1963, Johnson worked at the Gorgas Memorial Institute for Health Studies in Panama and studied the epidemiology of leishmaniasis. At the same time, she published further work on the taxonomy of lice and fleas.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q47011384. VIAF identifies the subject as 110164564. The Library of Congress control number is n80026734. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 1948, 1954 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Phyllis T. Johnson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.