Joanna Yvonne Wilson (born 27 January 1970) is a Canadian aquatic toxicologist and physiologist. Wilson is a multidisciplinary scientist whose work intersects the fields of environmental physiology, biochemistry, toxicology, bioinformatics and functional genomics. Her research focuses on studying cytochrome P450 enzymes and the effects of environmental contaminants on marine and freshwater species, the most notable being the impact of pharmaceuticals in the environment.[1] She is a professor in the department of biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Wilson was born in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. She completed her Honours Bachelor of Science in 1994 in Biology and Pharmacology at McMaster University and her Masters of Science in 1997 in Biology at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, under the supervision of Richard Addison and B.W. Glickman. She then went on to complete her Ph.D. in 2003 in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joint graduate program in Woods Hole, Massachusetts USA, under the supervision of J.J. Stegeman.[2] Her Ph.D. research focused on the functional characterization of cetacean aromatase and the phylogeny and functional conservation of vertebrate aromatases.
In 1992, Wilson started working as a research assistant for Janssen Pharmaceutica in Mississauga, ON, CA. From 1993 to 1994, Wilson worked as a research assistant at Environment and Climate Change Canada in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, under the supervision of Peter Hodson. In 1996, she did a work term as a research technician for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, Canada, where she worked with Richard Addison. Following the completion of her Ph.D., Wilson started a post-doctoral investigator position at WHOI, where she remained from 2003 to 2006. It was during this time that Wilson's work evolved from basic to applied research, where she started investigating the roles that different families of cytochrome P450 play in detoxification of various pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Wilson notably collaborated with Ocean Alliance Whale Conservation on contaminant exposure in whales in the Gulf of California, Mexico.
Wilson started her tenure at McMaster University in June 2006, and became a full professor in July 2019. Since 2015, Wilson has been an associate member of the Psychology, Neurosciences and Behaviour Department at McMaster University,[3] a guest investigator in the Department of Biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a guest investigator in the Department of Biological & Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, and a special graduate faculty in the department of integrative biology, University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Wilson's work focuses on understanding how stressors (e.g. temperature, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, other organic contaminants) impact fish physiology, growth, development and reproduction, over multiple generations. She works with a variety of fish species, including zebrafish, lake and round whitefish and yellow perch.
Wilson is part of several professional organizations including: Society of Toxicology and Chemistry (1997–present), Canadian Society of Zoology (2006–present), Society of Toxicology (2009–present), International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics (2009–present), and Radiation Research Society (2018–present). She was previously part of the Centre for Marine Evolutionary Biology (2012–2015) and the Society for Marine Mammalogy (1997–2007).