Nathan D. Wolfe | |
|---|---|
 Wolfe in 2011 | |
| Born | August 24, 1970 |
| Alma mater | Stanford, Harvard |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Virology |
| Institutions | Stanford, UCLA |
Nathan Daniel Wolfe (born 24 August 1970) is an American virologist. He was the founder (in 2007) and director of Global Viral [1] and the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University.
Wolfe spent over eight years conducting biomedical research in both sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. He is also the founder of Metabiota, which offers both governmental and corporate services for biological threat evaluation and management. He serves on the editorial board of EcoHealth and Scientific American and is a member of DARPA's Defense Science Research Council. His laboratory was among the first to discover and describe the Simian foamy virus. [2]
In 2008, he warned that the world was not ready for a pandemic. [3]
In 2011, his book The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age [4] was short-listed for the Winton Prize. [5]
As reported in a Wired feature in 2020, Wolfe worked with the German insurance firm Munich Re to offer major corporate leaders pandemic policies, which were not purchased; a stark reality during the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic. [6]
Wolfe has been awarded more than $40 million in funding from a diverse array of sources including the U.S. Department of Defense, Google.org, the National Institutes of Health, the Skoll Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Geographic Society. [7]
Wolfe is married to the playwright Lauren Gunderson and has 2 sons. As part of his work, he has lived in Cameroon, Malaysia and Uganda. [5]
A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.
A zoonosis or zoonotic disease is an infectious disease of humans caused by a pathogen that can jump from a non-human to a human and vice versa.
An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.
The Hong Kong flu, also known as the 1968 flu pandemic, was a flu pandemic that occurred in 1968 and 1969 and which killed between one and four million people globally. It is among the deadliest pandemics in history, and was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus. The virus was descended from H2N2 through antigenic shift, a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes are reassorted to form a new virus.
An emergent virus is a virus that is either newly appeared, notably increasing in incidence/geographic range or has the potential to increase in the near future. Emergent viruses are a leading cause of emerging infectious diseases and raise public health challenges globally, given their potential to cause outbreaks of disease which can lead to epidemics and pandemics. As well as causing disease, emergent viruses can also have severe economic implications. Recent examples include the SARS-related coronaviruses, which have caused the 2002–2004 outbreak of SARS (SARS-CoV-1) and the 2019–2023 pandemic of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2). Other examples include the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes HIV/AIDS; the viruses responsible for Ebola; the H5N1 influenza virus responsible for avian influenza; and H1N1/09, which caused the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Viral emergence in humans is often a consequence of zoonosis, which involves a cross-species jump of a viral disease into humans from other animals. As zoonotic viruses exist in animal reservoirs, they are much more difficult to eradicate and can therefore establish persistent infections in human populations.
The Skoll Foundation is a private foundation based in Palo Alto, California. The foundation makes grants and investments intended to reduce global poverty. Jeffrey Skoll created the foundation in 1999.
Devex is a social enterprise and media platform for the global development community. It aims to connect with and inform development, health, humanitarian, and sustainability professionals through news, business intelligence, funding and career opportunities related to international development. As an independent news organization, Devex employs more than 100 staff members in different locations, including Washington, D.C., where the organization is headquartered. It also maintains offices in Barcelona and Manila.
Walter Ian Lipkin is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and a professor of Neurology and Pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He is also director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, an academic laboratory for microbe hunting in acute and chronic diseases. Lipkin is internationally recognized for his work with West Nile virus, SARS and COVID-19.
Global Viral (GV), previously known as Global Viral Forecasting Institute (GVFI), is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 2007 by Nathan Wolfe to study infectious diseases, their transmission between animals and humans, and the risk involved with their global spread. An original goal of the organization was to develop an early warning system for pandemics and at one point Global Viral coordinated a staff of over 100 scientists in China, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, DR Congo, Republic of the Congo, Laos, Gabon, Central African Republic, Malaysia, Madagascar and Sao Tome.
Oyewale Tomori is a Nigerian professor of virology, educational administrator, and former vice chancellor of Redeemer's University. In 2024, he became the chair of West Africa National Academy of Scientists.
Robert Ellis Shope was an American virologist, epidemiologist and public health expert, particularly known for his work on arthropod-borne viruses and emerging infectious diseases. He discovered more novel viruses than any person previously, including members of the Arenavirus, Hantavirus, Lyssavirus and Orbivirus genera of RNA viruses. He researched significant human diseases, including dengue, Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers and Lyme disease. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of viruses, and curated a global reference collection of over 5,000 viral strains. He was the lead author of a groundbreaking report on the threat posed by emerging infectious diseases, and also advised on climate change and bioterrorism.
Guan Yi is a Chinese virologist. In 2014, he was ranked as 11th in the world by Thomson Reuters among global researchers in the field of microbiology. He obtained his PhD in microbiology at the University of Hong Kong and is now a professor of microbiology at his alma mater. His research on the viral respiratory disease SARS helped the Chinese government avert the 2004 outbreak of this disease. He is the current director of the State Key Laboratory for Emerging Infectious Diseases University of Hong Kong. In early 2017, Guan warned that the H7N9 influenza virus "poses the greatest threat to humanity than any other in the past 100 years".
Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen. Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci stated that the concept of Disease X would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses, instead of just individual strains, thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains. In 2020, experts, including some of the WHO's own expert advisors, speculated that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain, met the requirements to be the first Disease X.
Clade X: A Global Health Security Simulation was a pandemic modelling exercise led by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Health Security, which occurred on Tuesday, May 15, 2018, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C. The exercise was named after a hypothetical novel virus, and simulated efforts to counter a fast-moving and deadly epidemic released on purpose by a terrorist group consisting of scientists and their rich backers wanting to reduce overpopulation. In the simulation, the hypothetical pandemic resulted in 900 million simulated deaths. The exercise was invitation-only and nearly 150 people attended.
Dr. Daniel R. Lucey is an American physician, researcher, clinical professor of medicine of infectious diseases at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and a research associate in anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where he has co-organised an exhibition on eight viral outbreaks.
Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses (emergent viruses). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the illness in Germany.
Pandemic prevention is the organization and management of preventive measures against pandemics. Those include measures to reduce causes of new infectious diseases and measures to prevent outbreaks and epidemics from becoming pandemics.
Seema Yasmin is a British-American physician, writer and science communicator based at Stanford University. She is Director of Research and Education at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin helped to debunk myths about the coronavirus.
Nita Madhav is an epidemiologist and risk modeler who was CEO of Metabiota from 2019 - 2022.
Gary P. Kobinger is a Canadian immunologist and virologist who is currently the director at the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas. He has held previous professorships at Université Laval, the University of Manitoba, and the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, he was the chief of the Special Pathogens Unit at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for eight years. Kobinger is known for his critical role in the development of both an effective Ebola vaccine and treatment. His work focuses on the development and evaluation of new vaccine platforms and immunological treatments against emerging and re-emerging viruses that are dangerous to human health.
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