James M. Berger

James Michael Berger is a professor of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-directs the Cancer Chemical and Structural Biology Program at Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. His main area of research is the functions of molecular cellular machinery.^[1]

Personal life

Berger was born in 1968^[2] in Albuquerque, NM and grew up in Santa Fe to Michael and Pat Berger, both employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In high school, he spent a summer working there, solidifying his interest in biochemistry.^[3] In 1994, he married Marian Feldman, a professor of Near Eastern Studies, while both were graduate students at Harvard University.^[4]

Career

Berger studied biochemistry, with a minor in math, as an undergraduate at the University of Utah while spending the summers at a nuclear research facility.^[5] After graduating in 19990, he did his PhD at Harvard University studying protein crystallography where he worked with James C. Wang. He did a fellowship at the Whitehead Institute studying topoisomerases from 1995-1998. He then became an assistant professor and later professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. While employed there, he also worked as a staff research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1999 to 2013 and served as director of UC Berkeley’s Keck Macrolab. In 2013, he moved to Johns Hopkins University.

Research

Berger's lab researches DNA replication and the organization of the enzymes that are involved and the role of ATP in this process.^[6]

Awards

• 2011 - NAS Award in Molecular Biology - For "elucidating the structures of topoisomerases and helicases and providing insights into the biochemical mechanisms that mediate the replication and transcription of DNA"^[7]
• 2013 - Elected to the National Academy of Sciences

References