Sherry Johnson investigates the issues of climate cycles, their visible weather effects (e.g., hurricanes and drought), and the consequences of severe weather events in the Caribbean and the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. She received her doctorate in history from the University of Florida, and is now an associate professor in the Department of History at Florida International University in Miami. She has authored one monograph on Cuban history,  co-edited a collection of essays, and published sixteen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her monograph Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (The University of North Carolina Press) was published in 2011 and won the 2012 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize.

At the Rachel Carson Center, Johnson investigated the effects of five years of unusual and catastrophic weather events (1791–1796) and their disastrous consequences for a Spanish expeditionary army sent to Saint Domingue to contain the Haitian Revolution.