Professor Berger's research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability and performance. He is the creator of various widely-used software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications, and DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager which directly influenced features included in Windows 7.

His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship (2001), an NSF CAREER Award (2003), a Lilly Teaching Fellowship (2006), and a Best Paper Award at FAST 2007. Professor Berger served as the General Chair of the Memory Systems Performance and Correctness 2008 workshop, Program Chair of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments, and is currently an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems.