Professional Bio
Wes Ely, MD, MPH, is the Grant W. Liddle Professor of Medicine and Critical Care at Vanderbilt and founder and co-director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship (CIBS) Center. He is a sub specialist in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and a practicing intensivist who conducts patient-oriented, health services research and large-scale clinical trials. He serves as the Associate Director for Aging Research at the VA Tennessee Valley Geriatric Research Education Clinical Center (GRECC).
Dr. Ely’s research has centered primarily on improving the care and outcomes of critically ill patients with ICU-acquired brain disease, manifested acutely as delirium and chronically as an acquired dementia found in the Post-Intensive Care Syndrome or PICS. During and after the pandemic, he and the CIBS Center pursued the discovery of treatment options for acute COVID-19 and Long COVID. He and Dr. Pratik Pandharipande direct the CIBS Center, which consists of over 90 investigators from many facets of the health care including Medicine, Nursing, Surgery, Neurology, Anesthesia, Psychiatry, Biostatistics, Engineering, Radiology, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Speech Language Pathology.
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. This large research 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 25 years and is now pursuing dozens of NIH and VA funded investigations including establishing a brain repository to determine the type of dementia acquired post critical illness, the development of safer methods of sedating patients in the ICU and reducing delirium, and the treatment of Long COVID-related acquired brain dysfunction and dysautonomia. Dr. Ely has over 600 peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Ely graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans, Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude, with a BS in Biology in 1985. He continued at Tulane to receive his MD and MPH in 1989. He completed his medicine residency program and his postdoctoral fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Wake Forest University Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and trained in the medical management of Lung Transplantation at Barnes-Jewish in St. Louis.
Dr. Ely wrote a work of narrative, non-fiction entitled Every Deep-Drawn Breath, which won the 73rd annual Christopher Award for Literature and in 2025 was placed on the AMA’s list of “8 Great Books” (https://www.ama-assn.org/medical-students/specialty-profiles/8-great-books-hand-picked-doctors-your-reading-list). Dr. Ely donates 100% net proceeds from Every Deep-Drawn Breath to an endowment that helps survivors of critical illness and Long COVID pick up the pieces of their lives.
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