{"id":688082,"date":"2025-12-11T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=688082"},"modified":"2025-12-11T09:57:32","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T14:57:32","slug":"maiken-nedergaard-elected-national-academy-of-inventors-fellow-688082","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/maiken-nedergaard-elected-national-academy-of-inventors-fellow-688082\/","title":{"rendered":"Maiken Nedergaard elected to the National Academy of Inventors"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>The honor recognizes Nedergaard<b>\u2019<\/b>s groundbreaking research over the past decade, which has fundamentally reshaped basic neuroscience.<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.urmc.rochester.edu\/labs\/nedergaard\">Maiken Nedergaard<\/a>\u2014a pioneering neuroscientist and co-director of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\">University of Rochester<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.urmc.rochester.edu\/ctn\">Center for Translational Neuromedicine<\/a>\u2014has been elected a 2025 international fellow of the <a href=\"https:\/\/academyofinventors.org\">National Academy of Inventors<\/a> (NAI). The honor recognizes academic innovators whose work has led to patented technologies, translational breakthroughs, and broad societal impact. It is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors.<\/p>\n<p>Nedergaard\u2019s selection reflects more than a decade of groundbreaking research that has fundamentally reshaped basic neuroscience, reframed public discussions about sleep and brain health, and opened avenues for entirely new classes of therapies for neurological disorders.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>Revealing the brain\u2019s hidden <\/strong><b>\u2018<\/b><strong>plumbing system\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>In 2012, Nedergaard and colleagues first described the glymphatic system, a network of fluid channels that clears metabolic waste from the brain, primarily during deep sleep. This discovery resolved long-standing questions in neuroscience and catalyzed a new field focused on how sleep, vascular health, and cellular activity interact to protect the brain.<\/p>\n<p>More recently, the group <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cell.com\/neuron\/fulltext\/S0896-6273(25)00843-8\">identified the role of lymphatic vessels<\/a> located in the membranes surrounding the brain, which carry waste from the brain to the body\u2019s broader lymphatic system. Together, these interconnected pathways form a plumbing system in the brain now implicated in conditions ranging from Alzheimer\u2019s and Huntington\u2019s disease to traumatic brain injury and migraines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The honor recognizes Nedergaard\u2019s groundbreaking research over the past decade, which has fundamentally reshaped basic neuroscience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":688992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[486,37112,8366,42492],"class_list":["post-688082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-university-news","tag-awards","tag-faculty","tag-maiken-nedergaard","tag-medical-center"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - 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