Professor Newell Johnson

Newell Johnson is retired but holds emeritus professor posts at both Griffith University, Australia and at King’s College London (KCL). He is currently a clinical teacher and provides patient care at Griffith and collaborates in research at KCL as well as in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Canada, Norway and the USA. Newell also supervises six PhD students and two diploma students having supervised over 30 PhD students in his career.

In addition, he is a practising oral physician and oral/maxillo-facial pathologist with over fifty years of experience in head and neck oncology, oral pathology and oral medicine, along with general dentistry and periodontology, covering epidemiology, risk factors, diagnostic and prognostic methods and much activity in primary prevention/public health. As a dentist, oral physician, oral/maxillofacial pathologist and periodontist Newell takes a holistic approach to care so regularly works in conjunction with epidemiologists, public health experts, pathologists, microbiologists, cell and molecular biologists, and health services researchers. He also helps design projects involving extensive field work collecting, interpreting and writing up data from rural and remote communities.

Newell has wide experience of science publishing, having been editor-in-chief and an editorial board member of several well reputed journals as well as writing a leading textbook on Oral and Oropharyngeal Cancer. Much of Newell’s work deals with oral head and neck cancer but he has also written extensively on Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders and was among the first to publish on the associated microbiome.