Charles Johnson Obituary

Charles Sidney Johnson, Jr,

March 7, 1936 - April 28, 2025

Chapel Hill, North Carolina - Charles Sidney Johnson, Jr., scientist, professor, nature and travel photographer, beloved husband and father died on Monday, April 28, 2025, after a brief and unexpected illness.

He was born in Albany, Georgia, to Charles Sidney Johnson and Mary Virginia Reid Johnson. He developed a passion for photography while working at a local camera store in high school -- a passion that stayed with him for life. He earned a B.S. in chemistry from Georgia Tech in 1958 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, where his early research helped advance nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques.

He began his career as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois and on the faculty at Yale University. In 1967, he joined the chemistry faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he would teach and mentor graduate students for nearly four decades. His research at UNC focused on NMR spectroscopy. He was a pioneer in the development of Diffusion-Ordered NMR Spectroscopy (DOSY), an important innovation in molecular chemistry and analytical techniques. He was named the Mary Ann Smith Professor of Chemistry and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the AAAS.

Charles met Ellen McFarland during their college years. They married in 1958 and, after living in the Boston area and New Haven, they settled in Chapel Hill in 1967.

After retirement, he combined his knowledge of science and photography in his acclaimed book "Science for the Curious Photographer". With Ellen and with camera in hand, he traveled to Asia, Australia, Africa, South America, and many European countries.

Charles is survived by his wife, Ellen; his sons Daniel, David and daughter-in-law Andrea; his sister, Virginia; and three grandsons, Alex, Linus, and Leo.