Stanford University School of Medicine (Primary)

VA Palo Alto Health Care System (Secondary)

My primary current research focus is the human microbiome, and in particular, variation in patterns of microbial diversity within the human body as a function of time (microbial succession), space (biogeography within the host landscape), and in response to perturbation, e.g., antibiotics (community robustness and resilience). One of the goals of this work is to define the role of the human microbiome in health and disease. This research integrates theory and methods from ecology, population biology, environmental microbiology, genomics and clinical medicine. During the past few decades, my research directions have also included pathogen discovery and the development of new strategies for identifying previously-unrecognized microbial agents of disease. This work helped to spearhead the application of molecular methods to the diagnosis of infectious diseases in the 1990’s. This research has emphasized the use of genomic approaches for exploring host-microbe relationships. See http://relman.stanford.edu