Jiani Johnson, S.B. '26: A childhood passion becomes a bioengineering success

Find Jiani Johnson’s fifth-grade yearbook, and you’ll find a surprising response to the question of what she wanted to be when she grows up: a bioengineer. She liked tinkering and building things, and she always wanted to help people, making bioengineering the ideal interdisciplinary collaboration.

“As a bioengineer, you can design a therapeutic or a device that could affect millions of patients around the world,” she said. “We get to pull from pretty much every scientific field, from biology to physics to pure engineering. We get to take the best parts of it and use it to help people in a really widespread way.”

Fast forward to the present, and Johnson is set to graduate with her S.B. in bioengineering from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), with a secondary in educational studies. She’s augmented her education in numerous ways, including working as an undergraduate researcher in the Samir Mitragotri Laboratory for Drug Delivery, and serving as president of the Harvard chapter of International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM), an annual synthetic biology team. She’s also interned at Blueprint Medicines in Cambridge, and after graduating will be working full-time at Sanofi, a large biotech and pharmaceutical company that acquired Blueprint during her internship.

“I’ll be working on purifying drug compounds, making sure that they're safe and how to automate processes to both produce and make sure that the drug quality is high,” she said. “It's a good mix of lab work, technology development and automation. I think it's a good fit, and I'm really excited.”

The Mitragotri Lab has been on Johnson’s radar since she was a high school student in Nyack, New York, even mentioning it in her Harvard admissions interview. Though it took a couple years for an undergraduate position to open, Johnson joined at the end of her sophomore year and has been there ever since.

“I just was really interested in a lot of the innovations that were coming out of the bioengineering department, so it seemed like a really good opportunity for me,” she said. “I hadn't seen a lot of drug delivery work before. The lab’s focus on cancer therapeutics was really interesting to me, but it also works on a variety of issues from skin healing to infectious disease.”

Mitragotri, Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, eventually became Johnson’s advisor on her senior capstone project. Her project developed a drug delivery particle known as a cellular backpack capable of enhancing T cells, a type of white blood cell essential for fighting cancer. Her research devised a way to make T cells more impactful against solid tumors, which comprise 90% of all malignant cancers.

“Unlike lymphoma or leukemia, which are cancers of the lymph nodes or blood, any sort of mass is going to be categorized as a solid tumor,” she said. “Solid tumors are very dense, and because of that form an immunosuppressive bubble that makes it really difficult to target therapies. The cancer cells are working to make the job of the immune cells a lot harder, so that they struggle more to kill them.”

Johnson serves as president of both iGEM and the Harvard Science Club for Girls, has won multiple awards as a member of the Harvard Society of Black Scientists and Engineers, and is a SEAS peer concentration advisor in bioengineering. She first got involved with iGEM as a freshman, working on projects such as a process for producing high concentrations of protein extracts in aqueous droplets. 

“Coming into Harvard, I didn't have a ton of wet lab experience, and iGEM seemed like a really good chance to build up those skills,” she said. “We're completely student-run, and all the projects are self-directed. It's mostly bacterial work, but the projects have really spanned a variety of applications since I've been in it. I really fell in love with the idea of doing totally self-directed projects and collaborating.”

Johnson’s path to Sanofi began with an award from the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation, which she received at the Museum of Science in the fall of 2024. While there, she chatted with some representatives from Blueprint, who told the Champions for Biotechnology Education award winner to contact them if she was interested in an internship. When Sanofi acquired Blueprint this past June, Johnson had a foot in the door into one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

“Blueprint happened to have an opening in the biology department working on immunology therapeutics, which was pretty related to the immunology cancer therapeutics that I had been doing in the Mitragotri Lab before,” she said. “I was working primarily on evaluating drug efficacy, taking a target drug and testing how we can use genes in different ways of screening it from both cell models as well as in vivo models with mice. I had to learn how to do all of that work and all that analysis, so in my internship I actually was teaching people how to do it because nobody had done it before. So that was a really good experience too, to be able to take ownership over a project and really see it through over the course of the summer.”

Since arriving at Harvard, Johnson has always approached her courses and activities with the goals of gaining new skills. Her classes gave her technical and foundational knowledge. Her lab work taught her hands-on skills and how to research and write at a high level. Her clubs developed her autonomy and exposed her to outside factors such as funding, securing space, building community and marketing ideas. And her internship taught her about the scale and timeline of the professional world.

Put all that together, and you have a bioengineering senior perfectly equipped to use her Harvard education to make an impact and help a lot of people. 

“Harvard was a great choice,” she said. “I've gotten a lot of really close friendships that I'm sure will turn into collaborations and professional relationships down the road. I got to experience so many opportunities, and I'm just really lucky to be part of a really good engineering community.”