Summary

Dr. Woods is the Executive Director of the Hubert-Yeargan Center for Global Health.  In 2023, he was named the Wolfgang Joklik Distinguished Professor of Global health. He is a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pathology at Duke University, an adjunct associate professor in Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, and an adjunct associate professor in the Emerging Infections Program at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. Clinically, he serves as Chief of Infectious Diseases and clinical microbiology, and hospital epidemiologist for the Durham VA Medical Center. Dr. Woods is board-certified in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and medical microbiology.

Dr. Woods attended Yale University and pursued his medical education and training at Duke University and public health training at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a graduate of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he served in the Meningitis and Special Pathogens Branch of the National Center for Infectious Diseases. He formulated his interest in global health at Tenwek Hospital in Bomet, Kenya during his internal medicine residency and, while at the CDC, Dr. Woods performed programmatic work and outbreak investigations throughout the U.S. and the developing world.

Dr. Woods has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and has a particular interest in development of medical microbiology capacity in the developing world and the epidemiology of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. His research focuses on the development of novel diagnostic approaches to infectious disease and the potential for interspecies transmission of pathogens. His genomic approach to harnessing the host response for diagnosis of infectious diseases has been called a paradigm shift in the field. Dr. Woods is a partner in the Southeastern Center for Emerging Biological Threats, core PI of the Southeastern Research Center for Excellence on Emerging Infections and Biodefense, and a leader in the NIH-funded Vaccine and Therapeutics Evaluation Unit at Duke.