Wagoner Johnson honored for efforts to improve diversity and equity at Illinois

Professor Amy Wagoner Johnson has been named an inaugural recipient of the 2022 College Award for Sustained Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The award, introduced this year, recognizes a member of The Grainger College of Engineering’s faculty or staff in recognition of leadership in establishing or running programs or strengthening institutional policy in DEI-related research, teaching, and/or service.

For many years, Wagoner Johnson has been a devoted and passionate agent for change at Illinois. Her focused and sincere efforts have come without formal titles – through MechSE’s Faculty Recruiting Committee, Diversity Committee, and Promotion & Tenure Committee, formal and informal mentoring of women engineers, helping to substantively increase diversity in her research theme at Beckman, providing thoughtful advice on issues of gender and equity at IGB, educating her colleagues on unintentional bias in research and mentoring, and in many other ways.

She will be formally recognized at the college’s Faculty Awards Ceremony on April 25 at the Campus Instructional Facility.

Wagoner Johnson is also an Andersen Faculty Scholar whose research biomaterials is laying the scientific groundwork for the design of synthetic bone substitute materials and systems that may one day replace bone grafts currently harvested from patients themselves or from donors. Her work has transformed the field of bone regeneration through discovering physical mechanisms underlying effective bone regeneration, and applying these to design and manufacture scaffolds that have proven effective across scales in her novel large animal models.