He is also an early career scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md. He received an M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, and subsequently completed a clinical pathology residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Dr. Bernstein's laboratory studies chromatin structure and epigenetic regulation of mammalian genomes, with a particular focus on how these entities influence developmental fate decisions and disease. He currently serves as principal investigator (PI) of the National Human Genome Research Institute ENCODE project and a National Institutes of Health Roadmap Epigenome Mapping Center.