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Angela N. Johnson, PhD, RAC is Senior Vice President of Advisory Services at Avania, where she leads the global practice across diligence, regulatory, market access, and engineering leadership for medtech, biotech, and life science. Founder of The Real Cat AI Labs and adjunct faculty at Northeastern University.

Angela N. Johnson, PhD, RAC is Senior Vice President of Advisory Services at Avania, leading the global practice across diligence, regulatory, market access, and engineering leadership for medtech, biotech, and life science. She has led regulatory functions for multiple venture-backed companies through IPOs (Sigilon, Roivant) and strategic exits, with prior roles at GE Healthcare, IQVIA, Roivant, Sigilon, and Cytiva. She is the founder of The Real Cat AI Labs, a 501(c)(3) research nonprofit studying machine cognition, and serves as co-chair of the CMC committee at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. Angela is adjunct faculty in regulatory affairs at Northeastern University and a contributing author to the RAPS regulatory affairs textbooks. She holds a PhD in technical communication from Texas Tech and an MS in materials science from NC State.

Angela N. Johnson, PhD, RAC works in the space where medtech and biotech innovation meets the business of bringing it to market. Diligence frames the bet. Regulatory decides whether the bet is allowed. Market access decides whether anyone gets paid for it. Engineering leadership decides whether the thing actually works. The job is the connective tissue between them.

She is Senior Vice President of Advisory Services at Avania, where she leads the global practice that helps medtech, biotech, and life science companies make the calls that matter. Her clients range from venture-backed startups making their first regulatory bet to multinationals navigating compliance across thirty jurisdictions. Prior to Avania, she held leadership roles at GE Healthcare, IQVIA, Roivant, Sigilon, and Cytiva, and has led the regulatory function for multiple VC-backed companies through IPOs (Sigilon, Roivant) and strategic exits.

Angela is the founder of The Real Cat AI Labs, a 501(c)(3) research nonprofit studying how language models remember, reflect, and refuse. The lab's flagship project, Child1, explores adaptive moral decision-making in AI systems. She is adjunct faculty in regulatory affairs at Northeastern University, contributing author to the RAPS regulatory affairs textbooks, and co-chair of the CMC committee at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. Her 2017 work on synthetic MRI received the Lucien Levy Award for Best Original Research from the American Journal of Neuroradiology.

She holds a PhD in technical communication from Texas Tech University, an MS in materials science and engineering from NC State, and a BFA from East Carolina University. She lives in the Boston area.