January 27, 2023
CEZID/CBID Seminar Series presents David Wentworth
Submitted by Christine Huncovsky
The COBRE Center on Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, or CEZID, will host David Wentworth in the next presentation in the CEZID Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 27, in the Mara Conference Center on the fourth floor of Trotter Hall. The seminar will also be available via Zoom.
Wentworth will present "Influenza Virus Surveillance and Vaccines."
Wentworth currently serves as chief of the Virology, Surveillance, and Diagnosis Branch of the Influenza Division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has been the director of the National Influenza Center in the U.S. and the Collaborating Centre for Surveillance, Epidemiology and Control of Influenza at the CDC since April 2019. He is also vice chair of the WHO-Technical Advisory Group on Coronavirus Vaccines.
He received a Bachelor of Science in poultry science, a Master of Science in veterinary medicine, and a doctorate in virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he specialized in the study of influenza viruses. He studied coronaviruses as a postdoctoral fellow and later as an instructor in the department of microbiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. He has conducted virological research since 1990 and has published more than 200 papers and book chapters.
Prior to joining the CDC in 2014, Wentworth was the director of viral programs at the J. Craig Venter Institute from 2011 to 2014, where his studies focused on interspecies transmission, pathogenesis, viral evolution and vaccine development using synthetic genomic strategies. From 2002 to 2011, Wentworth was the director of the Influenza Virus and Coronavirus Pathogenesis laboratory at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, and an assistant professor at the State University of New York-Albany, where his laboratory studied interspecies transmission of influenza viruses and SARS-Coronavirus, genomic technologies and experimental vaccine approaches.
The CEZID seminar series is organized in the diagnostic medicine and pathobiology department in the College of Veterinary Medicine and is hosted by CEZID director, Juergen Richt.