Sarah L. Berga MD

Sarah L. Berga, MD is Professor and Chairman, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Associate Dean of Women's Health Research at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Vice President of Women's Health at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia, she took her undergraduate degree in Hormones and Behavior: Physiological Dimorphism and Gender Asymmetry. After obtaining her medical degree from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, she undertook a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School followed by a fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility with Dr. Samuel S.C. Yen at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. Her career experience includes administrative, research, clinical, and educational roles and activities. From 2003 to 2010, she was the James Robert McCord Professor and Chairman of the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Emory University School of Medicine. Prior to Emory, she was a tenured Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Senior Scientist at Magee-Women's Research Institute. To spur translational and clinical research in reproductive and women's health, she founded and then directed the Magee-Women's Clinical Research Center from 1990 to 2003.

She is the President of the Society for Gynecological Investigation and serves or has served on the Board of Directors of Emory Healthcare, University of Pittsburgh Physicians, American Society of Reproductive Medicine, and International Society of Gynecologic Endocrinology among others. She is a past President of the Society of Humanism in Medicine. Her NIH-funded research has focused on determining the mechanisms mediating stress-induced reproductive compromise and on investigating areas critical to reproductive and women's health, including the impact of stress and sex hormones upon brain plasticity and aging using state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques in human and simian models. Her team pioneered the use of cognitive behavior therapy for stress-induced fertility. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications, has served for 17 consecutive years on NIH study sections, and has been steadily funded by NIH. She has dedicated her career to advancing women's and reproductive health, fostering careers for women in academic medicine, studying sex differences, and developing infrastructure that fosters translational science and medicine.