Dr. Edward Ruby

Biography

Dr. Ruby has worked for 40 years on beneficial bacterial-host interactions. His doctoral training was at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, where he investigated luminescent bacteria isolated from the light organs of fish and contributed to the discovery of microbial quorum signaling. During his postdoctoral work at Harvard University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and UCLA, he collaborated with Dr. Margaret McFall-Ngai to develop the Vibrio fischeri-sepiolid squid light-organ association model for studying beneficial bacteria-host interactions. He was hired by the Symbiosis Cluster at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004 and held the Steenbock Chair in Microbiological Sciences, serving as Vice-Chair and Acting-Chair of the Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology. He has served on the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology and was a visiting professor at HuaZhong University in China and an EU/Marie Curie ITN researcher at the Max-Planck Institute in Bremen, Germany. In 2015, Dr. Ruby moved his lab to the University of Hawaii, focusing on the endemic squid-vibrio system, and in 2022, he brought his lab to the Caltech campus. His current research employs a broad-based approach to analyze sequential signaling cascades in nutrient manipulation to produce rhythmic patterns in bacterial metabolism underlying the persistence of associations, utilizes new analytical imaging approaches to discover novel pathways of signaling between symbionts and hosts, and involves comparative functional genomics to uncover principles controlling population-level interactions among symbionts.

Research Interests