Michele H. Johnson, MD

Michele H. Johnson, MD, specializes in treating aneurysms, strokes and vascular malformations in conjunction with neurosurgery. She is director of Interventional Neuroradiology at Yale Medicine. Neurointerventional radiologists image and treat different conditions affecting the brain using minimally invasive techniques.

As a young child, Dr. Johnson grew up watching the television series Quincy, M.E., a medical mystery drama based in Los Angeles. In each episode, the main character, a medical examiner, resolved complicated scenarios using forensics and lab tests. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and I planned to specialize in pathology after medical school,” Dr. Johnson says. Those plans changed later when she witnessed the finesse of a radiologist who made two diagnoses based on a single patient X-ray image.

Dr. Johnson easily recounts stories from her own diagnoses made over more than two decades at Yale. “A patient I treated when he was 8 years old for an embolism (blood clot) sent me a card in his 20s because he had just learned that I did his operation,” she says. “You know that you touch lives.”

At Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Johnson is professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, and of neurosurgery and director of interventional neuroradiology.