A University of Pittsburgh administrator who once served a directorial post at the National Institutes of Health, was named the new editor in chief of Science magazine, according to a statement released Wednesday by the university.

Jeremy Berg, the school's associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning in the health sciences, becomes the magazine's 20th top editor since its 1880 inception.

Berg, a chemistry professor who also has backgrounds in personalized medicine, computational and systems biology, will serve a five-year term with Science and succeeds Marcia McNutt. Ms McNutt has been elected to serve as president of the National Academy of Sciences beginning July 1.

At Science, a magazine founded with seed money from Thomas Edison, the editor is named by the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Jeremy Berg will bring exceptional scientific, technical, and administrative experience and insights to the position of editor-in-chief, and I am confident that he will help us to lift our journal’s standards to an even higher level,” Rush Holt, the AAAS CEO, said in the statement.

Gerald R. Fink, a former past president of AAAS and chair of the search committee, said the decision to select Mr. Berg was unanimous.

“Our committee felt that Jeremy Berg was a terrific choice among a group of excellent candidates,” said Fink. “His broad scientific perspective and passionate advocacy for basic research, combined with his interest in scientific policy, makes him a superb spokesperson for the scientific community.”

Mr. Berg, who is a former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH and has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, said he is "thrilled and humbled by the opportunity to work with the team at Science and AAAS."

Science claims it has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed, general science journal in the world.

First Published: May 25, 2016, 10:39 p.m.