E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH, a physician-scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center whose research has helped establish delirium as an important risk factor for long-term brain dysfunction in critically ill patients, has been invested as a member in the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Established in 2023, the academy honors outstanding scholarly achievements reflecting “independence of mind and intellectual courage” in the arts, sciences and learned professions. The investiture ceremony for this year’s class of 58 scholars was held Nov. 12 at the historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C.
Ely, the Grant W. Liddle Professor of Medicine, is founder and co-director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship (CIBS) Center at VUMC, and associate director for research for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Tennessee Valley Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) at the Nashville VA Medical Center.
A major research focus is delirium, acute confusion associated with serious illness, medical treatments, surgery and other factors in the intensive care unit. Ely and his colleagues have found that ICU-acquired delirium increases the risk of lingering cognitive, functional and neuropsychological impairments, including dementia.
For 25 years, through research protocols funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and VA, “our large team of physician-scientists and research staff has worked to sew together the scientific process with humanism to pave pathways of discovery that improve health care for the world’s sickest patients,” Ely said.
Ely earned his MD and MPH from Tulane University. He completed residency and a postdoctoral fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine and trained in the medical management of lung transplantation at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1998.
A practicing intensivist, Ely conducts patient-oriented, health services research and large-scale clinical trials. His interest in delirium led, in 2018, to the establishment of the CIBS Center, which is co-directed by Pratik Pandharipande, MD, MSCI, professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery, and the James Tayloe Gwathmey Director in Anesthesiology.
Ely has also written a Christopher Award-winning book, “Every Deep-Drawn Breath: A Critical Care Doctor on Healing, Recovery, and Transforming Medicine in the ICU.” Christopher Awards are presented annually by The Christophers, a nonprofit organization that honors written and visual work affirming “the highest values of the human spirit.”
Other recent honors include the VA’s Paul B. Magnuson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Rehabilitation Research and Development and the John W. Walsh PAR Award for Excellence, presented by the American Thoracic Society’s Public Advisory Roundtable in recognition of Ely’s compassionate care, innovative spirit and outstanding leadership.
Ely now joins a distinguished group of 118 scholars in the American Academy of Sciences and Letters that includes NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, novelist Salman Rushdie, and two recipients of the Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science — Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, PhD, and internationally known neurogeneticist Huda Zoghbi, MD.
