Professional Bio
Wes Ely, MD, MPH, serves as the Grant W. Liddle Chair in Medicine and is a sub-specialist in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. He is the founder and co-director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship (CIBS) Center, through which he conducts patient-oriented health services research as a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is a practicing intensivist with a focus on geriatric ICU Care and also serves as the Associate Director for Research for the VA Tennessee Valley Geriatric Research and Education Clinical Center (GRECC).
Dr. Ely's research originally focused safer protocols and medications for diseases such as sepsis and ARDS and then moved into improving the care and outcomes of all critically ill patients with ICU-acquired brain disease (manifested acutely as delirium and chronically as dementia). His research portfolio extends across many domains of acute critical illness in children and adults and into chronic illnesses and survivorship from syndromes like Long COVID and the Post-Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS).
The CIBS Center has amassed thousands of patients into cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, who together built the methodology for ICU acquired brain disease research and newly adopted treatment paradigms including the ABCDEF Bundle. Dr. Ely's team developed the primary tool (CAM-ICU, translated into 35 languages) by which delirium is measured in ICU-based trials and clinically at the bedside in ICUs worldwide.
Dr. Ely has been continuously federally funded (NIA and/or VA) for over 20 years and is now establishing a brain and tissue repository to determine the exact nature of post-ICU Dementia. He has over 600 peer-reviewed publications and a H-index of over 130.
Relevant Links
Publications
Education
MD - Tulane University, 1989
MPH - Tulane University, 1989
Internship - Internal Medicine - Wake Forest University, 1990
Residency - Internal Medicine - Wake Forest University, 1992
Fellowship - Pulmonary & Critical Care - Wake Forest University, 1995
Contact
Email
Kimryn.Rathmell@Vumc.Org
Address
777 Preston Research Building
2220 Pierce Ave
Nashville, TN 37232-6307