Jacques is the Donald A. Kerr Endowed Professor of Dentistry and serves as the Dean of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Jacques is President-Elect of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR) and immediate past-chair of the Section on Dentistry and Oral Health Sciences of the Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS). He has served as a chair and as a member of Oral, Dental and Craniofacial Sciences (ODCS) study section of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and has been the principal investigator for several NIH grants. Jacques served as the Co-Director of the University of Michigan Head and Neck SPORE funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Jacques is a AAAS Fellow and AADR Fellow, and recently received the Distinguished Scientist Award from International Association for Dental Research (IADR). Jacques is Associate Editor of the Journal of Dental Research and a member of the editorial board of several journals. His research interests are in salivary gland malignancies, cancer stemness, and in dental pulp stem cell biology. His current research foci are the study of the pathobiology of cancer stem cells in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas and salivary gland cancer. More recently, his laboratory also started studies aiming at the understanding of mechanisms regulating mesenchymal stem cell differentiation in the context of tissue engineering.