Julene Johnson

Julene K. Johnson, PhD is an associate director and professor in the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Institute for Health and Aging and UCSF Center for Aging in Diverse Communities. She is a cognitive neuroscientist and amateur musician with a bachelor’s degree in music. She has also sung in a number of community choirs over the years. She currently sings in Calling All Choir, which is a service-based choir in San Francisco. She has a long-standing interest in studying music in both healthy aging and neurodegenerative diseases. In 2010, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Jyväskylä, Finland where she studied the relationship between community choir singing and quality of life in older Finns. She is currently leading a large study funded by the National Institute on Aging to examine whether singing in a community choir is a cost-effective way to promote healthy aging in culturally diverse older adults.