Helen M. Berman, Director Emerita

Berman received her AB from Barnard College in 1964. She trained in crystallography with George Jeffrey at the University of Pittsburgh where she received her Ph.D in1967. After her postdoctoral training, she went to the Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center where she rose through the ranks from Research Associate to Senior Member. In 1989, she joined the faculty of Rutgers University and is currently a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emerita of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Her research has focused on nucleic acids, protein-nucleic acid interactions, and collagen. She has published greater than 290 scholarly articles.

Helen was a co-founder of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) archive that was launched in 1971 and has been committed to the continued development and maintenance of this community resource. Major accomplishments on this journey include taking leadership roles in establishing the Nucleic Acid Database (NDB, 1992, now NAKB), the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB, 2000), the worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB, 2003), the Structural Biology Knowledgebase (SBKB, 2008), and the Unified Data Resource for 3D Electron Microscopy (EMDataBank, 2007).

Helen is a member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Biophysical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Crystallographic Association, and the International Society for Computational Biology. She is the recipient of several awards including the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences, the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences, the ACA Martin Buerger and David Rognlie Awards, the Distinguished Service Award from the Biophysical Society, and the Carl Brändén Award from the Protein Society. Helen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2023

Her memoir is hosted by the American Crystallographic Association’s History Portal.

Publications: Google Scholar