NIMH Researcher Karen Berman Elected as AAAS Fellow
• Institute Update
Karen Berman, M.D., a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has been elected as a 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow .
Election as an AAAS Fellow recognizes AAAS members whose efforts to advance science or its application have distinguished them among their peers. Dr. Berman’s election recognizes her research using multimodal neuroimaging to bridge the gap between mechanisms of brain dysfunction and the cognitive and behavioral symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Dr. Berman is a senior investigator and chief of the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Branch, the Section on Integrative Neuroimaging, and the Psychosis and Cognitive Studies Section in the NIMH Intramural Research Program. Her research uses functional neuroimaging to map brain activity and brain chemicals associated with cognitive function in people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. She also studies cognitive functioning in people with genetic illnesses that impact cognition, such as Williams syndrome, and other conditions that impact cognition, such as normal aging. Her work has been widely published in journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Nature Medicine, Neuron, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Neuroscience, among others.
Dr. Berman received her M.D. from St. Louis University, after which she completed a medical internship at Washington University in St. Louis and received residency training in psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Berman also completed residency training in nuclear medicine at the NIH Clinical Center. She is board certified in both psychiatry and nuclear medicine.
In addition to this latest honor, Dr. Berman has received the A.E. Bennett Award for Neuropsychiatric Research and the George N. Thompson Award for Distinguished Service—both from the Society of Biological Psychiatry. She previously received the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Independent Investigator Award and Distinguished Investigator Award, four NIH Bench to Bedside Awards, and an NIH Director’s Award. She is a past president of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. Dr. Berman is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine).
NIMH congratulates Dr. Berman on her election and her outstanding clinical and translational research contributions.