Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NY. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the goal of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity.  

Berlin is a a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a passionate science communicator. She hosts the Nova series Your Brain on PBS where she explores the latest research on the neural basis of consciousness. She previously hosted Science Goes to the Movies on PBS and Discovery Channel’s Superhuman Showdown. She makes regular appearances on StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has appeared on the BBC, History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, and TEDx, and was featured in the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy. Dr. Berlin co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show, Off the Top, about the neuroscience of improvisation, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, Impulse Control. 

She is the recipient of numerous honors including the Young Investigator Award from the American Neuropsychiatric Association, the Young Investigator Award from the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder, and the Clifford Yorke Prize from the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. She was honored as one of Stony Brook University’s “40 Under Forty”, and won the 2015 BBC University Challenge as part of the Magdalen College, Oxford team.  

Berlin received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery. She is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and was a Visiting Professor at Vassar College, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/University of Zurich, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.