Jacques Ravel

Dr. Jacques Ravel is the Associate Director for Genomics at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) and a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland, where he focuses on the relationship between the microbiome and women’s health. His groundbreaking research is dedicated to deciphering the role of the vaginal microbiome in protecting against infections, using clinical genomics and systems biology in order to treat gynecological and obstetric conditions. His work seeks to better define the dynamics between hosts, microbial communities in the human body, and the environments that drive these ecological systems.

He is currently the Co-Director of the NIH funded Collaborative Research Center on Sexually Transmitted Diseases which applies systems biology to examine the connection between human genetic variation, sexually transmitted infections, and the functions of the vaginal microbiome. His work is also part of the White House’s Human Microbiome Project, a long-term NIH funded initiative. He has published over 225 peer-reviewed publications (19,884 citations) and has attracted over $30 million in grants with continuous NIH funding since 2005. His laboratory is currently supported by grants from the US National Institute of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the National Science Foundation.

He received his PhD from the University of Maryland-College Park in Environmental Molecular Microbiology and Ecology and performed his postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University working on microbial natural product chemistry. In 2012, he was elected to Fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) and in 2015, he was awarded the Blaise Pascal International Research Chair, one of the most prestigious European science honors. Dr. Ravel is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Microbiome and an Associate Editor at the journal mBio.