Washington

Jeremy Berg: varied approach.

The US National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) — the arm of the National Institutes of Health that focuses on basic research — has named its next director.

Jeremy Berg, head of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, will take up the post in November. He succeeds Marvin Cassman, who left in May 2002 to head the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, a biology lab at the University of California, San Francisco.

Berg says he aims to find the right mix of investigator-initiated research and large-scale projects, including collaborative grants in areas such as cell signalling. “The spirit of investigator-initiated, curiosity-driven research has been what NIGMS is all about,” he says. “But there are clearly advantages to large projects, so there has to be a balance.”

Berg also professes a strong interest in training young scientists, and in the multi-institute projects planned by National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Elias Zerhouni. He says that his previous work with Zerhouni, who was executive vice-dean at Johns Hopkins medical school before coming to the NIH, was an incentive for him to take the post at the NIGMS.

With an annual budget of more than $1.8 billion, the NIGMS is one of the world's largest supporters of lab-based biological research. Unlike most branches of the NIH, it has no disease-specific remit but instead backs basic science in areas such as cell biology.

Berg's own research focuses on the structure and function of proteins, and in particular on how proteins recognize their target destinations. He plans to take his laboratory with him to the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.