Staff Bio
Michael Berkwits, MD, MSCE, FACP
Director of the Office of Science Dissemination (OSD) in the Office of Science.
CDC role
Dr. Berkwits leads OSD in effectively communicating strategic science to inform policy and guide practice through the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) series of publications and collaborate with the Office of Communication to produce CDC Vital Signs, a high-profile platform to disseminate actionable scientific data with clear calls to action.
Previous experience
Michael Berkwits, MD, MSCE, FACP, is an ABIM-certified general internist with over 30 years' experience in medical editing, scholarly publishing, meta-research, clinical research methods, and evidence dissemination. He served as Vice President and Electronic Editor at JAMA and the JAMA Network (2013–2024), where he led digital content strategy across the Network's 13 journals. Previously he was Deputy Editor at Annals of Internal Medicine (2005–2013) and Assistant Editor at The Merck Manuals (2001–2005), where he expanded the publications' online presence and assets.
Dr. Berkwits is Co-Director of the 2022 and 2025 International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication and serves as Web Editor for the NLM-Fogarty Center-sponsored African Journal Partnership Program. Additionally, he is an active member of the AHRQ Evidence-Based Practice Center Stakeholder Panel and coauthor of the 2024 CONSORT/SPIRIT and CHART reporting guideline recommendations. He served as the Secretariat of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2011–2013), in which role he oversaw the first major revision of the ICMJE Recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals.
Education
Dr. Berkwits completed his internal medicine training at the University of Michigan (1990–1993) and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania (1994–1996). He was also Assistant and Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (1996–2013), where he received his Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology (MSCE).