Dr. Bruce Johnson

Degrees, Certifications & Courses

PhD: Chemical Oceanography, Dalhousie University
BEng: Chemical Engineering, North Carolina State University
Courses: electrical engineering, machining, fluid mechanics, data logger/ controllers

Specialties

Carbon cycle chemistry
Instrument design and development
Project design and management
Small scale physical – chemical processes

Capsular Resume

Bruce Johnson grew up in the U.S. at a time when the success of Sputnik drove Americans to emphasize science and technology education. The excitement if this period and interests in natural sciences and new technology led Bruce to enter the engineering program at North Carolina State University. Finishing this degree and with little interest in a career in industry, he began looking for ways to apply his engineering training to natural sciences. This led to an interest in oceanography, which at the time was an emerging science where sampling and measurement technologies were still in their infancy.

In the 1970’s Dalhousie University had a relatively new oceanography department that was emerging as one of the best in the world. Bruce entered the PhD program, was awarded an NRC scholarship in his second year, and finished his PhD in 1979.

Following a one year postdoctoral fellowship at Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dr. Johnson worked for the next 30 years in the Oceanography Department at Dalhousie University, variously as a postdoc, research associate, assistant professor (Academic), associate professor (Research), and from 1992 to 1998, as the executive director of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), Canada.  It was during this period, as researcher and administrator in Canada’s contribution to a major international effort to understand the role of the oceans in the global carbon cycle,  that Dr. Johnson became aware of the need for improved technology especially in the areas of measuring and monitoring in chemical oceanography.  Most of the effort in chemical oceanography at the time was devoted to developing better analytic techniques for laboratory measurements on seawater samples, and thus, oceanographers were a long way from realizing one of the main goals of JGOFS, and that was  “seeding the oceans with autonomous instruments measuring pCO2”.

Many of Dr. Johnson’s more than 100 refereed publications have dealt with development of instrument and measurement methods.  One of these, development of a gas tension instrument (GTD), led to formation of  Pro-Oceanus Systems Inc. (PSI) in 1998. With encouragement from a strong interest in this new instrument, PSI researchers subsequently developed the PSI CO2-Pro, a highly accurate and stable instrument for measuring pCO2.  Other dissolved gas instruments followed.