Dr. Berg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also has a clinical appointment in the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology-Oncology and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He graduated from Emory University with a B.S. in Biology and completed the M.D.\/Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Curriculum in Neuroscience. He subsequently underwent residency training in Clinical Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine.<\/p>\n
Dr. Berg is now a physician and researcher interested in the development and application of genetic tests in patients and their families. The recent revolution in genetic sequencing technology has led to an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the underlying etiology in families with genetic conditions, and yet raises potential pitfalls that must be addressed in order to translate these new technologies into the practice of clinical genomics. Dr. Berg is particularly interested in the range of \u201cincidental\u201d or \u201csecondary\u201d findings that are discovered during the course of genome-scale sequencing, including the pre-test counseling and informed consent process, computational analysis required to determine the likely clinical relevance of variants, best practices for return of these findings to patients, and the impact of genomic findings on patients and their families.<\/p>\n
He is the director of PPMH, and co-PI of NIH grants investigating the use of genome-scale sequencing as a diagnostic test in patients with suspected genetic disorders and as a potential screening tool in healthy newborns, and to develop a publicly available database of clinically relevant genes and variants through the \u201cClinGen\u201d project. He is also an Investigator in the UNC Center for Genomics and Society, which was recently renewed as an NHGRI Center for Excellence in ELSI Research to evaluate the prospect of using genomics to improve the health of adults in the general public.<\/p>\n