Kathleen R. Johnson is an American geologist and paleoclimatologist of indigenous descent (she is a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians). Her research focuses on reconstructing past climate change with speleothems, on active cave monitoring to understand the interaction of climate with speleotherm geochemistry, and analyzes climate and paleoclimate data to investigate natural climate variability. She earned a PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2004 and is an Associate Professor at the University of California Irvine.