leader founder mx archive-lead
Info
Director Emerita of the RCSB PDB and Board of Governors Professor Emerita of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers. Co-founder of the Protein Data Bank as a concept: at the 1971 Cold Spring Harbor symposium she was among those who proposed the archive idea to Walter Hamilton, who then established the PDB at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Spent her early career as a nucleic acid crystallographer at Fox Chase Cancer Center. In 1998, Berman and Phil Bourne won the contract to move the PDB from Brookhaven to the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB); she led RCSB PDB from 1998 until Stephen K. Burley took over in 2014. Also launched the Nucleic Acid Database (NDB) in 1991 and was a founding organizer of the PDB-IHM (Integrative/Hybrid Methods) archive effort.
Key Relationships
- Stephen K. Burley — successor at RCSB PDB (2014)
- John Westbrook — long-time RCSB PDB chief architect
- Phil Bourne — 1998 RCSB PDB contract co-PI
- PDB-IHM — founding organizer, with continued participation in IHM task forces
- Ligand Validation Workshop 2015 participant
Sources
- Berman RCSB PDB Director Emerita page: https://www.rcsb.org/pages/about-us/helen-berman
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_M._Berman
- Physics World profile: https://physicsworld.com/a/the-crystallographer-who-pioneered-protein-data-banks/
- 2016 LVW paper: https://www.cell.com/structure/fulltext/S0969-2126(16)00076-9