Dr. James Berger is the director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, professor of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of the Cancer Chemical and Structural Biology Program for the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. His research focuses on how multi-subunit assemblies use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) for transferring energy within the chromosome and controlling the flow of genetic information. Dr. Berger has a twenty year history of studying the fundamental mechanisms of enzymes that control cell proliferation and small molecule inhibitors that target such systems.

Dr. Berger received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Utah. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and completed a fellowship at the Whitehead Institute at MIT.

Dr. Berger works with a number of graduate programs at Johns Hopkins and oversees a busy lab. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.