Professor Estes is a professor in the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health and Sciences University, and Chief of the Division of Pathobiology and Immunology at the Oregon National Primate Research Center.

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He obtained his Ph.D. at Brigham Young University in the laboratory of Dr. Gregory Burton studying the contributions of follicular dendritic cells and the germinal center microenvironment to HIV pathogenesis. Dr. Estes continued his work as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Ashley Haase in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Minnesota, focusing on the in vivo immunopathology of lentiviral infections in lymphoid tissues in both human patient cohorts and non-human primate models. After his postdoctoral training, Dr. Estes joined the AIDS and Cancer Virus Program (ACVP) at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, which performs biomedical research for the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), where Dr. Estes served as a Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator for 10 years.
 

Professor Estes studies humans and nonhuman primate models to better understand how HIV/SIV persists within tissue microenvironments. In particular, he utilizes innovative high-dimensional spatial approaches to characterize, quantify and map viral reservoirs at high resolution and depth, to investigate mechanisms of viral reservoir persistence at the single-cell level while retaining critically important contextual insight into the cellular compartments, immune neighborhoods and inflammatory landscapes in which viral reservoirs reside.