# 2916
Nathan Wolfe is a name you may be familiar with, as he has received a fair amount of well deserved publicity over the past few years. The New York Times ran a major story (see Deep In The Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic) on his work about six months ago.
Dr. Wolfe is a field virologist – a virus hunter – and his work - and that of his colleagues - may very well reveal the identity of the next devastating virus to jump species from primates, or other mammals, to humans.
Dr. Wolfe founded and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI), a collaboration of more than 100 scientists worldwide who work to serve as a pandemic early warning system.
From his bio, on the GVFI website:
Dr. Nathan Wolfe is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University and Director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. He received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1993 and his doctorate in Immunology & Infectious Diseases from Harvard in 1998. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship in 1997, Dr. Wolfe was awarded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) International Research Scientist Development Award in 1999 and the prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2005.
Unlike many virologists who work primarily in laboratories, Dr. Wolfe conducts much of his research in the wild.
In October of 2008, GFVI received grants totaling $11 million dollars from Google.org and the Skoll Foundation to promote their work in isolating zoonotic viral threats to humanity.
(Screen shot of GVFI – Click to Visit the site)
This website is feature rich with many links to related content. When you visit, plan to bookmark it and return often.
While Dr. Wolfe often writes for peer reviewed journals, he also writes for more mainstream venues, recounting some of his exploits in the field.
They make for fascinating reading.
His latest article appears in the April Edition of Scientific American, and can be downloaded (as a PDF file) HERE.
You will find much more to peruse in his ever expanding list of Selected Publications and recent Press Coverage.
Dr. Wolfe as also posted a couple of short videos on Youtube, showing part of the work he and others are doing.
While we watch avian influenza with great interest, always in the back of our minds is the concern that the next great pandemic may come at us from left field – from a virus we simply weren’t expecting.
It is for that reason this blog on occasion strays away from just covering influenza. If you do a search on this blog you will find essays on Nipah Virus, Arenaviruses, Plague, Lyme, MRSA, and others.
A couple of overviews on the diversity of epidemic and pandemic threats to humans that you might have missed are:
