Dr. Bernstein received his MD degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1949 and completed his postgraduate training in internal medicine at the Cincinnati General and Jewish Hospitals. After serving two years in the US Air Force as an aeromedical examiner, he pursued fellowship training in pulmonary diseases at Bellevue Hospital in New York and allergy at Northwestern University. Soon after his return to Cincinnati, he became the first board-certified internist-allergist, a prerequisite for the establishment of the University of Cincinnati Allergy and Immunology Fellowship Training Program which currently has NIH T32 grant support. Eighty fellows have been trained or cross-trained in this program since 1958.

 
Research publications include areas such as: pulmonary physiology of children; previously unrecognized allergens (bacterial, algal, acardial); platelet dysfunction in atopic patients; novel immunodiagnostic assays; hypersensitivity to seminal fluid; modification of allergen immunotherapy; numerous clinical trials of anti-allergic and anti-asthmatic agents for asthma and hay fever; and new diagnostic approaches to occupational asthma/immunologic lung diseases. These studies have been funded by the NIH, EPA and NIOSH.

He has served on editorial boards and as a consultant reviewer for sixteen medical journals and has been on numerous advisory committees for the NIH, FDA, NSF and AMA. He was chairman of the Pulmonary/Allergy Drug Advisory Committee of the FDA from 1988 until 1992. He was chairman of the Pulmonary Allergy Drug Committee of the U.S. Pharmacopia from 2000 to 2005 and he currently represents the state of Ohio for the USP Convention, which extends from 2005 to 2010. He is a member of fourteen professional societies and a fellow of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunonlogy and the American College of Physicians. He was president of the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology in 1982 and still serves on various committees of that organization.

His publications include 30 book chapters, co-authorship/co-editorship of 4 books and over 300 papers in peer review journals. He was most recently a co-editor of "Asthma in the Workplace", an acknowledged classic textbook in this field.