David B. Johnson is a tenured full Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, and is a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice. Prior to joining the faculty at Rice in 2000, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he had been a member of the faculty for eight years. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1990, the M.S. degree in Computer Science in 1985, and the B.A. degree with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences in 1982, all from Rice University. After completing his Ph.D., he also served for two years as a Research Scientist and Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Rice. His research interests are generally in the areas of network protocols, distributed systems, and operating systems, particularly in the interactions between these areas.

Professor Johnson founded and is leading the Monarch (MObile Networking ARCHitectures) research group at Rice (previously at Carnegie Mellon University), developing adaptive networking protocols and architectures to allow truly seamless wireless and mobile networking. He has worked substantially on the problems of Mobile IP and different types of multihop wireless networking such as mobile ad hoc networking, sensor networking, and mesh networking, including in the areas of routing, security, and medium access control (MAC) protocols. Related to this research, he was very active for over 15 years in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the principal protocol standards development body for the Internet, primarily in the Mobile IP and the Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) working groups. He was one of the main designers of the IETF Mobile IP protocol standard for IPv4, the current version of IP in use in the Internet today, and is the primary designer of Mobile IP for IPv6, the new version of IP replacing IPv4. His group's Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR) for wireless ad hoc networks has also been published by the IETF as an Experimental protocol for the Internet.

From 2005 through 2009, Professor Johnson served as the elected Chair of ACM SIGMOBILE, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing; and was previously Treasurer of SIGMOBILE from 1997 through 2005; he also served two yeas as a member of the ACM SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (SGB EC), the group that oversees all of ACM's SIGs (Special Interest Groups). He is a member of the steering committee for the ACM MobiCom and MobiSys conferences; was General Chair for IEEE MASS 2012, COMSNETS 2011, MSN 2007, VANET 2006, and MobiCom 2003; and Technical Program Chair for VANET 2005, MobiHoc 2002, and MobiCom 1997. He has been a member of the Technical Program Committee for over 40 international conferences and workshops, and has been an editor for the journals Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE Pervasive Computing (Founding Editorial Board Member), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Wireless Networks, Mobile Networks and Applications, and Mobile Computing and Communications Review. Professor Johnson received the NSF CAREER Award in 1995 and the ACM SIGMOBILE Distinguished Service Award in 2001.