Bradley Bernstein


Bradley E. Bernstein is a biologist and Professor of Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is the Director of the Broad Institute Epigenomics Program. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School. He is known for contributions to the fields of epigenetics and cancer biology.

Education

Bernstein received his B.S. in physics from Yale University, and his Ph.D. and M.D. from the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Career and research

Early career

Bernstein completed his residency in clinical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and his post-doctoral research in Stuart Schreiber’s lab at Harvard Chemistry. Together with Stuart Schreiber and Eric Lander, Bernstein characterized the epigenetic landscape in pluripotent embryonic stem cells, leading to the first characterization of bivalent chromatin.

Research

Bernstein joined the faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2005. In 2009, he and launched the at the Broad Institute.
Research in the Bernstein laboratory focuses on epigenetics and how changes in gene activity, as opposed to gene sequence, guide development and lead to disease. The lab uses high-throughput genomic technologies to study how chromatin controls gene activity in different contexts. Bernstein's major contributions include ChIP-seq technology, now the standard for mapping chromatin and protein-DNA interactions in mammalian cells, the characterization of bivalent chromatin that poises developmental genes for alternate fates in development, and the identification of epigenetic defects that cause brain tumors and treatment failures. He also directs epigenome mapping centers for ENCODE and the NIH Epigenomics project at the Broad Institute.

Recognition

In 2009, Bernstein received an Early Career Scientist award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2015, he was awarded the Paul Marks prize for Cancer Research. In 2016, he received an NIH Pioneer award, and became the Bernard and Mildred Kayden Endowed MGH Research Institute Chair. Bernstein also serves on the editorial board of Science.