Ray Keller grew up on a dairy farm in southeast Missouri, just west of Cape Girardeau, a small town on the Mississippi River. He worked on the farm through college at the nearby Southeast Missouri State College, and took a B.S. degree in Biology in 1967, the first college graduate in his family.
He was inspired by his research mentor, Professor John Hinni, and others there, to go to graduate school. He was awarded an NSF Fellowship and went to the University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill, where he took a M.S. before being drafted into the United States Army in 1969. He was trained in Chemical Biological and Radiological Warfare but served as a Medical Lab Technician in Alaska, and was honorably discharged at the rank of SPC5 in 1971, after which he returned to Illinois. He took a Ph.D in 1975 under David Stocum, renowned for his work in amphibian regeneration but encouraged and supported Keller’s work in morphogenesis on the then-emerging model system, Xenopus laevis. Keller followed this interest with postdoctoral work with Professor J.P. Trinkaus, Yale University (1975-1977) and with Professor Robert Briggs, Indiana University (1977-1980).
He joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley (1980) where many advances were being made in many areas of analytical morphogenesis, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1988. He moved to the University of Virginia in 1995 where he served as Chair of the Department of Biology (1999-2004) and Program Director of the NIH Developmental Biology Training Grant.
He teaches a popular, long-running developmental biology research laboratory course for undergraduates. He has taught in the Embryology Course, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, and in the Xenopus course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professor of Biology. Ray Keller’s laboratory is known for using live imaging of cell motility and biomechanical measurements of normal and experimentally manipulated embryos and embryonic explants to learn how molecular and cellular events generate the patterned forces and tissue mechanical properties that shape the embryo. Major contributions include characterization of the convergent extension tissue movements, development of the concept that active, patterned cell intercalation is a major mechanism of morphogenesis, direct measurement of embryonic forces and tissue material properties, and the development of specialized explants to study morphogenesis.
Academic Titles, Awards & Elections
- Chair, Department of Biology 1999-2004
- NIH MERIT Award, 2002-2012
- Marcus Singer Regeneration Award, 2003
- Member, Japan Prize Selection Committee, 2005
- Nominator for The Japan Prize 2005-present
- Appointed Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professor 2007
- Mid-Atlantic Regional Representative and Board Member, Society for Developmental Biology, 2016-2019
- Teaching Award, Department of Biology, University of Virginia, 2007 and 2022
- Extramural Teaching: The Embryology Course, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA intermittently, from 1979-2018
- Extramural Teaching: Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus Course, Cold Spring Harbor Lab, 1994-2019; Co-Director of the course 2008-2010.
- Lifetime Achievement Award, Society for Developmental Biology, 2020.