Raymond E. Keller

Biosketch

Ray Keller is the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professor, Department of Biology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. He grew up on a dairy farm west of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, took a B.S. in Biology at Southeast Missouri State College (1967), an M.S. (1969) and a Ph.D. (1975), at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and served in the United States Army (1969-1971). He did postdoctoral work with J.P. Trinkaus (“Trink”), Yale University and Robert Briggs, Indiana University, before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley (1980) where he rose to Full Professor. He moved to the University of Virginia in 1995, where he served as Chair of the Department of Biology (1999-2004), and as an NIH Training Grant Program Director. He received an NIH MERIT Award 2002-2012, the Marcus Singer Regeneration Award, 2003, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Developmental Biology, 2020. He served as Mid-Atlantic Regional Representative to the Society for Developmental Biology, 2016-2019. He received the Department of Biology Teaching Award twice, and he has taught in international courses for graduate and postdoctoral trainees, including the Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus at Cold Spring Harbor, the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Concepts in Developmental Biology, Karolinska Institute, and at the International Course on Developmental Biology, Quintay, Chile). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.

Research Interests

The Keller lab does live imaging of cell motility and biomechanical measurements of the forces and mechanical properties of tissues in normal and experimentally manipulated embryos and in explanted embryonic tissues, to learn how molecular and cellular events generate the patterned forces that shape the embryo. Major efforts include characterization of embryonic tissue movement of convergent extension and the active, orthogonally patterned radial and mediolateral cell intercalations that drive convergent extension in the amphibian, Xenopus laevis. They have developed specialized explants to image cell behavior and measure the forces generated by convergent extension and other morphogenic machines of early development. The Keller lab has also characterized the variations in the mechanisms of gastrulation and body axis elongation, and other morphogenic movements in other species of amphibians, and in other species as well, with collaborators. He teaches an advanced experimental developmental biology laboratory for undergraduates at the University of Virginia. This class has been a long term effort to develop techniques to give a real, unknown outcome research experience to undergraduates, and to develop a format in which to better explore new ideas and avenues of attack on problems in morphogenesis, ones too imaginative, and risky, for normal channels of research support, and to share these findings.