Overview: 

Ned Ruby has worked for 30 years on beneficial bacterial-host interactions. He was hired into the Symbiosis Cluster at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, where he held the Steenbock Chair of Microbiological Sciences, and was Vice-Chair of the Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology. He has served on the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology, been a visiting professor at HuaZhong U, China, and an EU/Marie Curie ITN Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute, Bremen, Germany, and received the University of Hawaiʻi’s Regents Medal for Excellence in Research. Recently, he was a Moore Scholar at Caltech and was Chair of the American Academy of Microbiology Awards Board. With Nicole Dubilier, he instituted and chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Animal-Microbe Symbioses, and is currently directing the annual West Coast Bacterial Physiologists Conference at Asilomar, CA. Until recently, he co-directed the NIH-COBRE Integrative Center for Environmental Microbiomes and Human Health at the University of Hawaiʻi.

In 2022, Ruby moved his lab to the newly launched BSE. His current research uses (i) a broad-based approach to analyze how sequential signaling cascades and nutrient manipulation produce rhythmic patterns of bacterial metabolism that underlie symbiotic persistence, (ii) new analytical and imaging approaches to discover novel pathways of signaling between a symbiont and its host, and (iii) comparative and functional genomics and epigenetics to discover principles controlling population-level interactions among symbionts.

Research

Recent Publications