James Berger is a Professor of Biophysics and the Director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prior to his arrival at Hopkins in 2013, he served on the faculty in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1995, Berger was appointed as a Whitehead Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1998. His research focuses on understanding how the structure and mechanism of molecular machineries help control DNA replication, gene expression, and chromosome topology.