David Relman

Education

Relman was born in Boston, raised in Lexington, MA, and then moved to Philadelphia where he attended Germantown Friends School. He was an undergraduate at MIT and graduated in 1977. He attended medical school at the Harvard University Medical School and received an M.D. degree, magna cum laude in 1982. He did his internship, residency, and a clinical infectious diseases fellowship year at Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed his infectious diseases and microbiology research training as a postdoctoral fellow with Stanley Falkow at Stanford University. He began his independent career as a physician-scientist with a research focus in microbial pathogenesis and soon thereafter became interested in the discovery and identification of previously-unrecognized microbial pathogens. The problem of differentiating novel pathogens from normal microbiota, the diversity of the indigenous microbiota, and the relationship of the latter with human health and disease, formed the basis of his subsequent research career.

Academic career

Relman joined the faculty at Stanford in 1994 and has remained there since. His development of broad range small subunit rRNA gene amplification methods for revealing novel microbial pathogens led to the identification of several important previously-uncharacterized human pathogens, including the agents of bacillary angiomatosis and of Whipple's disease. He was an early pioneer in the study of the human microbiome using modern molecular methods, and published some of the first broad molecular surveys of the human oral and gut microbiota. His current research seeks to elucidate the nature and basis of diversity, assembly, stability and resilience in the human microbial ecosystem, and their relationships with health and disease. Relman became the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor at Stanford in 2009.

He has held a variety of leadership positions at Stanford: he is the co-director, along with Amy Zegart, of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and he is a senior fellow at both the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center for Innovation in Global Health. Relman serves as the Chief of Infectious Disease at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Relman has also served in a number of United States government advisory capacities, particularly on biosecurity issues.

Relman was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2003, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and a member of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) in 2011. He has received the Pioneer Award (2006) and the Transformative Research Award (2013) from the National Institutes of Health. He served as the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2012-13. He is currently chair of the Forum on Microbial Threats at the Institute of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Science, Technology and Law, as well as the Intelligence Community Studies Board, at the National Academies of Science.

Personal life

Relman is the son of Arnold "Bud" Relman, longtime editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Relman is a long-time volunteer for the Rock Medicine program organized by the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, and has been the Chief Medical Officer for the program since 2006. In the 1990s he was featured on MTV for his work there, and he served as MTV's medical correspondent from 1995 to 1997.