Dr. Clay Johnston - Dean and Vice President of Medical Affairs

UT-Austin, Dell Medical School

Since March 2014, Clay Johnston has served as the inaugural Dean of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin.  Previously, Clay was associate vice chancellor for research at the University of California, San Francisco. He also directed the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, overseeing the planning, development, and implementation of a $112-million, five-year, National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant award; and founded the UCSF Center for Healthcare Value to engage faculty and trainees in improving the quality of care while also lowering costs.

 He is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. He later received a PhD in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a resident in Neurology at UCSF, where he later trained in Vascular Neurology. During his 20 years at UCSF, he rose the academic ranks to Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology, and directed the Stroke Service.

 Clay has authored more than 300 publications in scientific journals and has won several national awards for his research and teaching. In particular, he has published extensively in the prevention and treatment of stroke and transient ischemic attack. He is perhaps best known for his studies describing the short-term risk of stroke in patients with transient ischemic attack and identifying patients at greatest risk, and also for his work related to measuring the impact of research. He has led several large cohort studies of cerebrovascular disease and three international multicenter randomized trials, two of which are ongoing.