Steven Reed PhD, MS, BA

Steve Reed is the Founder, President, and CSO of the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI). His academic appointments include Professor of Medicine at Cornell University Medical College in New York and Research Professor of Pathobiology at the University of Washington. He serves on several editorial review committees, has served as a member of the Tropical Medicine Review Board of the National Institutes of Health, and has served as a member of diagnostic and vaccine steering committees of the World Health Organization.

Dr. Reed received a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Montana in 1979. That year he was appointed as Scientist of the National Institute of Amazon Research in Manaus, Brazil, where he directed research on tropical diseases. Dr. Reed joined Cornell University Medical College in 1980 as Assistant Professor of Medicine, continuing to work in Brazil as manager of the Cornell-Bahia program in International Medicine. He joined the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute in 1984 where he worked until founding IDRI in 1993. In 1994 he co-founded Corixa Corporation (which was later sold to GlaxoSmithKline, GSK) where he served as Chief Scientific Officer until leaving in 2004. In 2008 Dr. Reed co-founded Immune Design Corp. where he served as CEO until 2011. Dr. Reed’s research interests have focused on the immunology of intracellular infections, and on the development of vaccines and diagnostics for both cancer and infectious diseases. He led the team that, together with GSK, developed the first defined tuberculosis vaccine to advance to clinical trials, and has developed the first defined vaccines for leishmaniasis, as well as the K39-based diagnostic tests currently licensed for leishmaniasis.