Faculty Profiles

Jay is Amgen-Perlmutter Professor of Biology and Chair of the Biology Department at Reed College, where he began teaching in 1999. Before he began teaching, Jay was a research scientist at Microgenics Corporation, a small biotechnology company in California (now a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific). Jay earned a BS in biochemistry, with a minor in music, in 1986 and a PhD in microbiology in 1994 from the University of California at Davis. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. At Reed, he teaches courses in Microbiology, Immunology and a senior seminar on Bacterial Pathogenesis. His research focuses on the molecular pathogenesis of Escherichia coli bacteria. Jay has received funding for undergraduate student-driven research from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Murdock Charitable Trust, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He and student co-authors have published a number of articles in professional journals, and he holds a patent for a therapeutic drug discovery technology. Jay is a curriculum section editor for the American Society for Microbiology's Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education.

Biology Department webpage