Jacques Ravel, PhD

• B.Sc., 1990, Biology and Chemistry, University of Nancy I, France
• M.Sc., 1992, Microbiology, University of Nancy I, France
• Ph.D., 1994-99, Microbial Ecology, University of Maryland at College Park (Dr. Russell Hill, advisor)
• Post-doctoral fellow, 1999-2002, The Johns Hopkins University, Chemistry Department (Dr. Craig Townsend)
• Assistant Investigator, 2002-2007, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), Rockville, MD
• Associate Professor, 2007-2012, Dept. Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine
• Professor, 2012-present, Dept. Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine
• Associate Director for Genomics, 2010-Present, Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS), University of Maryland School of Medicine
• Acting Director, 2022-2025, Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS), University of Maryland School of Medicine
• Director, Center for Advanced Microbiome Research and Innovation (CAMRI)

Dr. Ravel is the Director of the Center for Advanced Microbiome Research and Innovation (CAMRI) (camri.umaryland.edu) at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) (igs.som.umaryland.edu) and the John L. Whitehurst Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in Environmental Molecular Microbiology and Ecology and performed his postdoctoral training as a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Chemistry, working on microbial natural product chemistry.

Before accepting his current position in 2007, Dr. Ravel was an Assistant Investigator at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD, where the first microbial genome was sequenced in 1995. He was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2012 and in 2015, he was awarded the Blaise Pascal International Research Chair (www.chaires-blaise-pascal.ens.fr). Dr. Ravel is the Editor in Chief of the journal Microbiome (www.microbiomejournal.com) and an Associate Editor for the journal mBio. 

Human microbiome, vaginal microbiome, bacterial vaginosis, Chlamydia trachomatis, HPV, Trichomonas vaginalis, genomics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, multi-omics, bioinformatics, computational biology, 3D biomimetic models, live biotherapeutics products, probiotics, Lactobacillus, translational microbiome science.

Ravel J, Gajer P, Abdo Z, Schneider GM, McCulle SL, Karlebach S, Gorle R, Russell J, Tacket CO, Brotman RM, Davis CC, Ault KA, Perralta L and Forney LJ. 2011. The vaginal microbiome of reproductive-age women. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 108 Suppl 1:4680-7. 

Gajer P, Brotman RM, Bai G, Sakamoto J, Shutte UME, Zhong X, Koenig SSK, Fu L, Ma Z, Zhou X, Abdo Z, Forney LJ, and Ravel J. 2012. The temporal dynamics of the vaginal microbiota. Science Translational Medicine. 4, 132ra52.

Holm JB, Humphrys MS, Robinson CK, Settles ML, Ott S, Fu L, Yang H, Gajer P, He X, McComb E, Gravitt PE, Ghanem KG, Brotman RM, Ravel J. 2019. Ultrahigh-Throughput Multiplexing and Sequencing of >500-Base-Pair Amplicon Regions on the Illumina HiSeq 2500 Platform. mSystems. 2019; 4(1).

Elovitz MA, Gajer P, Riis V, Brown AG, Humphrys MS, Holm JB, Ravel J. 2019. Cervicovaginal microbiota and local immune response modulate the risk of spontaneous preterm delivery. Nature Communications. 10(1):1305.

Ma B, France MT, Crabtree J, Holm JB, Humphrys MS, Brotman RM, Ravel J. 2020. A comprehensive non-redundant gene catalog reveals extensive within-community intraspecies diversity in the human vagina. Nature Communications. 11(1):940. 

France MT, Fu L, Rutt L, Yang H, Humphrys MS, Narina S, Gajer PM, Ma B, Forney LJ, Ravel J. 2022. Insight into the ecology of vaginal bacteria through integrative analyses of metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data. Genome Biology. 23(1):66.