Dean of Arts and Sciences

Professor Berger-Sweeney was appointed Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences as of August 23, 2010. She comes to us from Wellesley College, where she was Associate Dean of the College and Allene Lummis Russell Professor in Neuroscience. She has been on the faculty at Wellesley since 1991 and was named Associate Dean in 2004.

As Associate Dean, Professor Berger-Sweeney brought an inclusive, collaborative style to her oversight and support of 20 academic departments and programs. She sat on multiple committees, including Presidential Advisory, Budget, Faculty Appointments, and Curriculum and Instruction. During her tenure as Associate Dean, she sought to improve faculty recruitment, retention, and professional development and was responsible for strategic planning initiatives relating to faculty diversity, interdisciplinary programs, and non-tenure-track faculty. From 2004 to 2006, she also served as director of the Neurosciences Program at Wellesley and helped spearhead the creation of that interdisciplinary major.

Professor Berger-Sweeney has demonstrated a strong commitment to critical issues such as need-blind admissions and increased financial aid. Her passion for teaching and the creation of new knowledge is reflected by the impressive credentials of the students and fellows she has guided through a thesis or independent study and by the accomplishments of her mentees from the Minority Mentoring Program at Wellesley, in which she has been active since 1998. Wellesley undergraduates appear as co-authors on a number of Professor Berger-Sweeney's scholarly publications. From 1995 to 2006, she directed the Society for Neuroscience's Minority Neuroscience Fellowship Program, a federally funded training grant to provide pre-doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships to underrepresented minorities engaging in neuroscience research.

A 1979 graduate of Wellesley, Professor Berger-Sweeney received an M.P.H. in environmental health sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, and a Ph.D. in neurotoxicology from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 1989. Following her graduate training, she worked for two years at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), a multidisciplinary public health research institution in France.

Professor Berger-Sweeney's research focuses on the neurobiology of learning and memory. Her research includes behavioral, neurochemical, and anatomical studies, all aimed at understanding mechanisms involved in normal memory and cognitive processes and how these processes malfunction in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders, such as Rett syndrome and Alzheimer's disease. Her work has been recognized by a National Science Foundation Young Investigator award, among other honors. She holds, with Dr. Rachael Neve, a patent for a model for studying Alzheimer's disease-like neuropathology and associated cognitive impairment.

She is a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and has served on numerous national and professional boards and committees. She has been a member of the editorial board of Behavioral Neuroscience, the Behavioral Neuroscience Review Panel of the National Science Foundation, and an NIH Study Section panel. Widely acknowledged for her efforts to increase diversity in the biological sciences, she received a Lifetime Mentoring Achievement Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 2006. In May of this year, the HistoryMakers organization, a national nonprofit research and educational institution, honored her as one of the nation's leading African-American scientists. She also just completed a term as Treasurer for the Society for Neuroscience.