Greg Berns

Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D.

Professor and Author 

Greg grew up in San Juan Capistrano, California. His passion for the outdoors began there while exploring the hills and beaches of Southern California and later expanded to hiking and cycling the west coast with adventures on the Colorado River.

Greg attended graduate school at the University of California, Davis where he received a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and then the University of California, San Diego for an M.D. He moved to Atlanta in 1998 to join the faculty at Emory University. Currently, he is a professor in the psychology department, where he directs the MRI center. In the past, he used MRI to study how the human brain makes decisions, but he is best known for starting a project to train dogs to lie still in the scanner so that we can understand how dogs’ brains work. He has written 6 books, including the NYT bestseller How Dogs Love Us.

In 2021, Greg and his wife, Kathleen, moved to a farm on the Upper Flint, where they raise miniature cows. His last book, Cowpuppy, is about how cows think.