Kirk Johnson

Kirk Johnson is the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History where he oversees the world’s largest natural history collection. He is an advocate for science, nature and the power of museums to influence the future.

Johnson oversees a museum that hosts more than 4 million visitors each year. Throughout his tenure, the museum has developed many new exhibitions, including the “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils-Deep Time,” “Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World” and “Cellphone: Unseen Connections.”

The museum is a preeminent center of science and is home to more than 148 million scientific specimens and objects. In 2024, its scientists published over 660 scientific peer-reviewed works and named 122 new species. In 2023, Johnson led an international effort to quantify the specimens housed in 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums resulting in a global database that contains more than a billion objects.  

Johnson’s research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of dinosaurs, and he has excavated fossils on all continents. He is also renowned for his ongoing efforts to communicate science to a broader audience through popular books, lectures, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and collaborations with artists. He has hosted several PBS shows including Making North America, The Great Yellowstone Thaw; Polar Extremes; Ice Age Footprints; and Walrus: Life on Thin Ice. 

Johnson is originally from Bellevue, Washington, and has a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in geology and paleobotany from Yale University. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of South Australia, worked as a marine geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey and served as a Crosby lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his arrival at the Smithsonian in 2012, he was a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science where he led scientific expeditions around the world and ultimately served as the museum’s vice president and chief curator.  

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SI-229-2025