Skyler Johnson, MD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute. As a physician and researcher, he has sought to improve the lives of both individuals and the community through exemplary care and expertise in the area of health services research. His clinical specialties include prostate cancer and other genitourinary malignancies as well as gastrointestinal malignancies, lung cancer, and lymphoma. His research interests include comparative effectiveness, patient communication, patient education, clinical outcomes, quality of life research, cost-effectiveness, decision analyses, and clinical trial design.
Dr. Johnson's research interests and passion for cancer care began during medical school at Michigan State University. He then completed a year-long research fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Department of Radiation Oncology. He completed his residency in radiation oncology at Yale, where he served as Chief Resident. While at Yale, he received additional training as a Health Sciences Research Fellow as part of the Yale National Clinical Scholars Program (NCSP) and a member of the Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy and Effectiveness Research Center (COPPER) group.
His prior comparative effectiveness research on the use of non-traditional cancer treatments garnered national and international media attention from the lay press and resulted in over 350 news stories. He and members of his research team conducted television, radio, and print interviews with NBC, CNN, NPR, BBC, TIME Magazine, Reader's Digest, among others, and it was also prominently featured in the New York Times. More importantly, the research addressed an unmet need in the oncology medical literature and has been used in health policy documents including the WHO's report on cancer. This research has led to an ongoing study in collaboration with national cancer experts quantifying misinformation and potential for harm contained within cancer articles on social media as well as a multi-institutional intramural grant identifying sources of exposure, motivations, and perceptions of complementary and alternative medicine use in cancer. While these projects are ongoing, Dr. Johnson continually seeks to improve patient care and patient-physician communication by serving as Chair of the Huntsman Cancer Institute's Genitourinary Cancer Centers Communications and Community Outreach Committee as well as being a member of the NRG Oncology New Investigator Committee and American Society for Radiation Oncology’s (ASTRO) Communications Committee. He also recently gave guest lectures on misinformation at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at a multi-institutional forum on health mis- and disinformation.
