National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni announced the appointment of Jeremy M. Berg, as the new director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

Dr. Berg is currently director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences and professor and director of the Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. He is also director of the Markey Center for Macromolecular Structure and Function and co-director of the W.M. Keck Center for the Rational Design of Biologically Active Molecules, both of which are at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Berg is expected to begin his NIGMS appointment in early November.

Dr. Berg will replace Judith Greenberg, who became acting director of NIGMS in May 2002 following the departure of Marvin Cassman. Dr. Cassman had led the institute since 1993.

As NIGMS director, Dr. Berg will oversee a $1.8 billion budget that funds basic research in the areas of cell biology, biophysics, genetics, developmental biology, pharmacology, physiology, biological chemistry, bioinformatics and computational biology. NIGMS currently supports more than 4,400 research grants -- about 10 percent of the grants funded by NIH as a whole. NIGMS also supports a substantial amount of research training as well as programs designed to increase the number of minority biomedical scientists.

Dr. Berg's research focuses on the structural and functional roles that metal ions, especially zinc, have in proteins. He has made major contributions to understanding how zinc-containing proteins bind to the genetic material DNA or RNA and regulate gene activity. His work, and that of others in the field, has led to the design of metal-containing proteins that control the activity of specific genes. These tailored proteins are valuable tools for basic research on gene function, and such proteins could one day have medical applications in regulating genes involved in diseases, as well. Dr. Berg has also made contributions to our understanding of systems that target proteins to specific compartments within cells and to the use of sequence databases for predicting aspects of protein structure and function.

Dr. Berg has been a faculty member at Johns Hopkins since 1986. Immediately before his faculty appointment, he was a postdoctoral fellow in biophysics at Hopkins. Dr. Berg received B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry from Stanford University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1985.