Dr Ramsay received his Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1978/79 and his PhD there in 1986. After postdoctoral training at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, he was promoted to Research Fellow there in 1992 and to Senior Research Fellow in 1997 before moving to the University of Newcastle in Australia in 1999 as a tenured Associate Professor. In 2001, he joined the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans as a Professor in the Department of Medicine, where he also became Director of the Gene Therapy Program in 2005 and Director of the Louisiana Vaccine Center in 2007. Dr Ramsay accepted the position of Head of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology at LSUHSC in 2010 and was awarded the Garret John Buddingh Endowed Professorship in Microbiology in 2011.

Dr Ramsay’s broad research interests concern the immunobiology of infections by viruses and other intracellular parasites. The aim is to develop improved vaccines against a variety of currently intractable diseases (eg. HIV/AIDS, TB), that continue to present major difficulties for conventional approaches to vaccination. He co-developed the "prime-boost" vaccination strategy that generates sustained, high-level immune responses against vaccine antigens. The outstanding potential of prime-boost vaccination has encouraged his group to establish projects to develop effective vaccines against a variety of infectious and non-infectious diseases.