Howard Curtis Berg (March 16, 1934 – December 30, 2021)[2] was the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics and professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, where he taught biophysics and studied the motility of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli).

His youngest, daughter Elena, studies animal behavior at the American University in Paris.

[2] Among his major achievements was the discovery that bacteria swim by rotating their flagellar filaments, which was also the title of a paper he was most proud of.

At the age of 87, he was awarded an NSF grant to study the stator unit that drives rotation of the bacterial flagellum being itself a rotary machine.

[5] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985[1] and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1990 ("for the elucidation of complex biological phenomena, particularly chemotaxis and bacterial locomotion, through simple but penetrating physical theories and brilliant experiments").