Nathan Wolfe

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Roy Chapman Andrews Society Distinguished Explorer for 2012

By Kylee Reed

Nathan Wolfe | 2012Nathan D. Wolfe is an up and coming young American microbiologist and field virologist who will receive the Distinguished Explorer Award of the Roy Chapman Andrews Society in Beloit, Wisconsin, on February 3, 2012.

Wolfe graduated from Stanford in 1993 and went on to earn a doctorate in Immunology & Infectious Diseases at Harvard in 1998. One year later the National Institutes of Health (NIH) honored him with an International Research Scientist Development Award and in 2005 he received the prestigious NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.

Distinguished Explorer Award Presentation

Awards Dinner (Following Award Presentation – Reserved seating)

Wolfe has spent over eight years in Southeast Asia (Malaysia) and sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda, Cameroon) utilizing active field research and mathematical algorithms to target and prevent what he calls the next pandemic. Due to the high rate of exchange of novel infectious agents between non-human species and humans, this mission is of particular interest to the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI) which he founded in 2007. GVFI has shown through extensive research that the most devastating diseases originate in animals, a concept most clearly illustrated by Wolfe’s seminal discovery of the natural transmission of retroviruses between primates and humans.
Recently, Nathan Wolfe’s interests have taken him into the heart of Africa where he has documented the unsanitary slaughter and consumption of bushmeat in local villages, a practice that influenced his authorship of A Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age.  Wolfe writes that in using modern technologies, scientists and researchers can track down the source and nature of a possible viral outbreak. He argues that the innovations making diseases so readily transmittable are the same ones that can readily prevent them from spreading.

In A Viral Storm, he takes readers along on his groundbreaking and often dangerous research trips to reveal origins of deadly diseases and to explain the role that viruses have played in human evolution.

Currently, Dr. Wolfe teaches Human Biology as the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University and acts as the Director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. Recent accolades include being named one of Popular Science’s ‘Brilliant 10’, becoming a member of Rolling Stone’s ‘Top 100 Agents of Change’, and being designated as one of National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers.