Ruth Ley Bio

Ruth Ley received a BA in Integrative Biology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a NRC-NASA Fellowship for post-doctoral work with Dr. Norman Pace at CU Boulder. She moved to Washington University School of Medicine to work with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon on the human microbiome in 2004. She was named an Instructor in 2005 and a Research Assistant Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in 2007. In July 2008, Ley joined the Department of Microbiology at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor, and in 2013 became an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell. She has been Director of the Department of Microbiome Science at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen since July 2016.

Ley is a Thompson ISI Highly Cited Researcher, whose awards include a Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the ISME Young Investigator Award, and the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine. She is a member of EMBO, of the European Academy of Microbiology, and of the American Academy of Microbiology.