Marc G. Berman

Marc G. Berman is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on understanding how environmental factors interact with human cognition, emotion, and behavior, particularly through the lens of environmental neuroscience. He leads the Environmental Neuroscience Lab (ENL), investigating how natural and urban environments influence brain function, memory, attention, and mental health.

Dr. Berman holds a B.S.E. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Psychology and Engineering from the same institution. His postdoctoral training was at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Prior to Chicago, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina.

His research interests include the cognitive and affective benefits of natural environments, brain network efficiency, and the neurobiological underpinnings of self-control and emotion regulation. Recent work explores how urban design elements (e.g., greenspace, street activity) relate to crime rates and mental health outcomes, leveraging big data from social media and geospatial tools.

Key contributions include demonstrating that natural environments improve memory and attention by ~20%, and that city characteristics like population diversity and segregation correlate with implicit racial biases. His lab employs fMRI, neuroimaging, computational modeling, and ecological data to quantify brain-environment interactions.

Dr. Berman collaborates across disciplines, integrating neuroscience, psychology, urban planning, and data science to inform evidence-based environmental design for public health. Current projects include analyzing social media data to map gang networks and investigating how heat and greenspace influence emotional states in urban populations.