BIRCWH Scholar

Jerica Berge, PhD, LMFT, CFLE

Assistant Professor
Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
University of Minnesota

Project Title:
The Family and Home Environment as a Predictor of Adolescent Obesity

Mentors:
Primary Mentor: Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, MPH, RD
Mentor: William Doherty, PhD, LMFT, CFLE
Mentor: Scott Crow, MD
Statistician: Melanie Wall, PhD

Biography:
Jerica Berge, PhD, LMFT, CFLE, is an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School.  She received her PhD in marriage and family therapy with a specialization in medical family therapy from the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Berge is a licensed marriage and family therapist and an approved marriage and family therapy supervisor who specializes in collaborative care and family health issues.  She trains family medicine residents in behavioral science and supervises medical family therapists in training.  Dr. Berge has specialized clinical training in child play therapy, loss and grief issues, critical incident stress management, couples therapy, parenting, depression, anxiety, group therapies, and working with families struggling with chronic illnesses.
Dr. Berge’s research interests include family/home environment predictors of adolescent obesity, reducing health disparities through community engagement and participatory action research, resiliency of children with chronic illnesses, clinical effectiveness of couples therapy/family therapy in reducing biopsychosocial problems.

Dr. Berge has been awarded an NIH K-12 career development award through the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) program at the Deborah E. Powell Center for Women’s Health at the University of Minnesota.  As a K-12 BIRCWH scholar, Dr. Berge will focus her research on family and home environment predictors of adolescent obesity.  She will use qualitative and quantitative measures to better understand the processes linking familial factors, gender differences and adolescent obesity.  Dr. Berge will also carry out an intervention study as part of her K-12 award within family practice clinics using community-based participatory research methods to address the needs of families in reducing the obesity epidemic in adolescent youth, and in particular adolescent females.