Kentucky environmental attorney Sanders salutes Sarah Johnson of Lexington as 2010 White House Fellow.

The White House has announced the appointment of 15 outstanding men and women to serve as White House Fellows. The 2009-2010 class of White House Fellows represents a diverse cross-section of professions including medicine, business, media, education, non-profit and state government, as well as two branches of the U.S. military.  We are very proud to salute Sarah Johnson of Lexington, Kentucky as a 2010 White House Fellow.  You go girl!

Sarah Johnson, 29. Hometown: Lexington, KY. Sarah Johnson is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, where she pursues research at the nexus of biology and planetary science. For the past two years, Sarah has helped develop a life detection instrument for a future mission to Mars; prior to that, she completed field seasons in Antarctica, Australia and Madagascar, conducted research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and worked at mission control for the NASA Opportunity and Spirit Mars Rovers. Her publications address topics ranging from global warming on early Mars to biodiversity in inaccessible ecosystems on Earth, and in 2007 she published a paper announcing the discovery of the world’s oldest living organism. Sarah also co-founded Common Hope for Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to alleviating healthcare deficiencies in Kenya, and she serves as a consultant at United Nations climate change negotiations. She is a Goldwater, Truman and Rhodes Scholar, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. She holds a B.A. in mathematics and environmental studies from Washington University in St. Louis, a second B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics and an M.Sc. in biology from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in planetary science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.