Update Your ProfileAcademic Title:
Research Associate
Primary Appointment:
Microbiology and Immunology
Email:
Location:
Health Sciences Facility III, 670 West Baltimore St, Baltimore 21201
Phone (Primary):
410-706-6716
Phone (Secondary):
240-606-6353
Education and Training
- M.Sc., 1985, Mathematics, Institute of Mathematics, Wroclaw Univ., Poland
- Ph.D. 1993, Mathematics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY.
- Post-Doc, 1993-1994, Mathematics, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA.
- M.Sc., 2000, Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
- Post-Doc, 2000-2002, Computational Biology, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
Biosketch
I am a Research Associate at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) (www.igs.som.umaryland.edu) and a faculty in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. I received my Ph.D. degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Mathematics and worked for several years at different universities doing research in pure mathematics. In 1999 I have moved to bioinformatics and received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Biology working analysis of microarray data. Before accepting the current position in 2007, I was an Bioinformatics Scientist at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD.
Research/Clinical Keywords
bioinformatics, bacterial vaginosis, preterm delivery
Highlighted Publications
- 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.
- Ravel J, Brotman RM, Gajer P, Ma B, Nandy M, Fadrosh DW, Sakamoto J, Koenig SSK, Fu L, Zhou Z, Hickey RJ, Schwebke JR and Forney LJ. 2013. Daily temporal dynamics of vaginal microbiota before, during and after episodes of bacterial vaginosis. Microbiome 1:29.
- Romero R, Hassan SS, Gajer P, Tarca AL, Fadrosh DW, Bieda J, Chaemsaithong P, Miranda J, Chaiworapongsa T, and Ravel J. 2014.The vaginal microbiota of pregnant women who subsequently have spontaneous preterm labor and delivery and those with a normal delivery at term. Microbiome, 2:18.
Additional Publication Citations
Neuendorf E., Gajer P, Bowlin AK, Marques PX, Ma B, Yang H, Fu L, Humphrys MS, Forney LJ, Myers GSA, Bavoil PM, Rank RG, Ravel J. 2015. Chlamydia caviae infection alters abundance but not composition of the guinea pig vaginal microbiota. Pathogens and Disease.
Romero R, Hassan SS, Gajer P, Tarca AL, Fadrosh DW, Bieda J, Chaemsaithong P, Miranda J, Chaiworapongsa T, and Ravel J. 2014.The vaginal microbiota of pregnant women who subsequently have spontaneous preterm labor and delivery and those with a normal delivery at term. Microbiome, 2:18.
Fadrosh D, Ma B, Gajer P, Sengamalay N, Ott S, Brotman RM, Ravel J. 2014. An improved dual-indexing approach for multiplexed 16S rRNA gene sequencing on the Illumina MiSeq platform. Microbiome. 2(1):6.
Romero R, Hassan S, Gajer P, Tarca A, Fadrosh DW, Nikita L, Galuppi M, Lamont RF, Chaemsaithong P, Miranda J, Chaiworapongsa T and Ravel J. 2014. The composition and stability of the vaginal microbiota of normal pregnant women is different from that of non-pregnant women. Microbiome. 2(1):4.
Ravel J, Brotman RM, Gajer P, Ma B, Nandy M, Fadrosh DW, Sakamoto J, Koenig SSK, Fu L, Zhou Z, Hickey RJ, Schwebke JR and Forney LJ. 2013. Daily temporal dynamics of vaginal microbiota before, during and after episodes of bacterial vaginosis. Microbiome 1:29.
Ravel J, Gajer P, Fu L, MauckCK, Koenig SSK, Sakamoto J, Motsinger-Reif AA, Doncel GF, Zeichner SL. 2012. Twice-Daily Applications of HIV Microbicides Alter the Vaginal Microbiota. mBio 3(6):e00370-12
Brotman RM, Bradford LL, Conrad M, Gajer P, Ault KA, Peralta L, Forney LJ, Carlton JM, Abdo Z,and Ravel J. 2012. Association between Trichomonas vaginalis and vaginal bacterial community composition among reproductive-age women. Sexually Transmitted Diseases. 39(10):807-812.
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.
Sellitto M, Bai G, Serena G, Fricke WF, Sturgeon C, Gajer P, White JR, Koenig SSK, Sakamoto J, Boothe D, Gicquelais R, Kryszak D, Puppa E, Catassi C, Ravel J, Fasano A. 2012. Proof of concept of microbiome-metabolome analysis and delayed gluten exposure on celiac disease autoimmunity in genetically at-risk infants. PLoS ONE. 7(3):e33387.
Caporaso JG, Lauber CL, Costello EK, Berg-Lyons D, Gonzalez A, Stombaugh J, Knights D, Gajer P, Ravel J, Fierer N Gordon, JI and Knight, R. 2011. Moving pictures of the human microbiome. Genome Biology, 12(5):R50.
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. 2010. The vaginal microbiome of reproductive age women. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 108 Suppl 1:4680-7.
Forney LJ, Gajer P, Williams CJ, Schneider GM, McCulle SL, Karlebach S, Brotman RM, Davis CC, Ault KA and Ravel J. 2010. Comparison of self-collected and physician-collected vaginal swabs for microbiome analysis. Journal of Clinical Microbiology. 48(5): 1741–1748.
Research Interests
My research over the last ten years centered around the development of statistical methods to analyzed complex genomic data. The first important paper on this subject characterized classes of vaginal bacterial community states, called community state types, in women from four ethnic groups. This was followed by a paper on the temporal dynamics of the vaginal microbiota where I have developed spline and Taylor expansion mixed effect models to model stability of the vaginal bacterial communities over the menstrual cycle. The key result of the modeling effort was an observation that the extrema of the curve measuring deviation of the vaginal bacterial community from stability, coincide with the extrema of the densities of estrogen and projesteron over the time of menstrual period. More recently, I have been developing statistical methods investigating the connection of between the structure of microbial communities and preterm delivery as well as other adverse outcomes.