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Senior Scientist
Merck
Cristina Johnson is a Senior Scientist in the Regulated Immunogenicity group at Merck. Throughout her nearly 5 years at the company, she has specialized in the development and qualification of ligand-binding assays and testing preclinical and clinical samples for various drug and vaccine candidates in a regulated setting. Cristina dove deeply into automation strategy and scripting resulting in a first-generation automated assay for several programs. She also took on the strategy and authorship of the first automation-only qualification and method. In close collaboration with the Robotics team and guiding a contract vendor, she improved the method further to a nearly end-to-end automated ligand binding electrochemiluminescence (ECL) assay on a smaller platform, cutting sample testing turn-around time by more than half. Cristina continues to push the limits of automated assays and empowers others to do so as well.