Wes Van Voorhis
Wesley C. Van Voorhis, MD, PhD is a professor of medicine, adjunct professor of global health and microbiology, and director of the Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases (CERID) at the University of Washington. At Rockefeller University, he was among the first to discover and characterize human dendritic cells, an accomplishment that earned his advisor, Dr. Ralph Steinman, the 2011 Nobel Prize for Medicine. For the past 25 years, Dr. Van Voorhis has worked on pre-clinical drug development for various parasitic infections. He has published over 280 peer-reviewed papers and has won numerous academic awards.
![a man wearing a blue shirt and a blue bow tie.](https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Wes.VanVoorhis.jpg?w=267&h=267&crop=1)
Far from being a “dead” pursuit that focuses on old ideas, modern philosophy proposes and debates important, new concepts. All of us can learn from it.