A curated look at the neurologists shaping the next era of brain health — through research, advocacy, and digital influence.
This feature is curated by Curie's editorial team using a combination of publicly visible signals — including academic citation trends, social media engagement on LinkedIn and X, conference presence, and peer recognition — alongside our own editorial judgment about who is meaningfully shaping the neurology conversation right now.
Holder of the Marta and Owen Boris Chair in Stroke Research at McMaster and founding Director of the Hemorrhagic Stroke Research Program at PHRI, he's running some of the largest stroke trials in the world — including ENRICH-AF, a 300+ center, 23-country global trial rethinking antithrombotic therapy after intracranial hemorrhage — with leadership roles in landmark trials published in the NEJM and Lancet.
Backed by the HDSA Berman Topper Career Development Award and a 2025 AAN Health Equity Research Award, she's one of the few neurologists systematically documenting racial disparities in Huntington's Disease — her ENROLL-HD analysis revealed significant delays in diagnosis for Black patients — while co-leading UCLA's neurology residency health equities curriculum and publishing on how AI could either narrow or widen neurological care gaps.
A neurocritical care specialist and the current Adult Neurology Residency Program Director at Washington University in St. Louis, he's shaping the next generation of neurologists while pursuing funded clinical and translational research in neurovascular disease — selected for the AAN's 2025 Transforming Leaders Program as a rising mid-career leader.
A neurologist-scientist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and recipient of the 2024 ANA Grass Foundation Award in Neuroscience, she's building a pioneering CRISPR gene therapy platform for neurodegenerative diseases — her lab's 2024 PNAS paper demonstrated successful reversal of C9orf72 mutation pathology in human neurons, and she's now partnering with Denali Therapeutics to solve the hardest problem in the field: safely delivering gene editors to the brain.
An Icelandic-born aphasia researcher at the University of South Carolina's Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery and recipient of the 2025 AAN Lawrence M. Brass Stroke Research Award, he's challenging the long-held belief that language recovery plateaus after stroke — his work on gradual lesion expansion is revealing why a third of patients actually decline over time, with the goal of building personalized, neuroimaging-guided speech-language therapy protocols.
An MIT-trained engineer turned neurologist with dual appointments in Neurology and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt, she brings a rare computational lens to the ICU — serving as Medical Director of ICU EEG while using neurophysiologic signal processing, supported by an NIA K23 grant, to uncover the brain mechanisms behind delirium and cognitive decline in critically ill patients.
The inaugural recipient of the ANA's Rising Star Award in 2025, he runs a lab at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center that is redefining how we think about microglia in Alzheimer's — his research showing that amyloid-beta drives microglial expression of GPC4 and APOE to accelerate tau pathology is opening new therapeutic targets for antibody-based drugs that could interrupt the disease cascade.
A vascular neurologist at Baptist Health Lexington with a PhD in Clinical and Translational Sciences from the University of Kentucky, his doctoral research developed novel MRI biomarkers for detecting subcortical white matter injury in vascular disease and Alzheimer's — now selected for the AAN's 2025 Health Care Equity Program, he's bringing cerebrovascular expertise to underserved communities in Kentucky's stroke belt.
An Associate Professor of Neurology at Mount Sinai and Director of its Headache Medicine Fellowship Program, she's carving out an entirely new clinical space — the Transgender Headache Medicine Program — while publishing research on migraine prevalence, severity, and links to discrimination in sexual and gender minority populations, a largely understudied area in headache medicine.
A movement disorders fellow at Washington University backed by a 2025 Parkinson's Foundation-funded Clinical Research Training Scholarship, she's using resting-state functional MRI to map the brain networks underlying dystonia in Parkinson's disease — a debilitating and poorly understood complication — with the aim of identifying new therapeutic targets and improving quality of life for patients who currently have few options.
