Stephen Waxman, MD, PhD

Stephen G. Waxman, MD, PhD

Stephen Waxman is the Bridget Flaherty Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience and Pharmacology at Yale University. He served as Chairman of Neurology at Yale from 1986 until 2009. He founded the Neuroscience & Regeneration Research Center at Yale in 1988 and is its Director. Prior to Yale, he held faculty positions at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

Dr. Waxman’s research capitalizes on the “molecular revolution” to develop new therapies that can restore function after nervous system injury. He has published more than 800 scientific papers. His H-index is 126 and his papers have been cited more than 60,000 times.

Dr. Waxman’s first paper in Nature was published in 1970. His research defined the ion channel architecture of nerve fibers, and demonstrated its importance for axonal conduction (Science, 1985). He demonstrated sodium channel plasticity that supports recovery of impulse conduction in demyelinated axons (Science, 1982), and pinpointed the molecular identity of the channels that restore impulse conduction in MS (PNAS, 2004), His molecule-to-man studies on pain include a translational leap from laboratory to humans, where he used molecular genetics, molecular biology, and biophysics to demonstrate the role of ion channels in human pain (PNAS, 2006). He led an international coalition that identified sodium channel mutations as causes of peripheral neuropathy (PNAS, 2012). He has used atomic-level modeling to advance pharmacogenomics in a paper (JAMA Neurology, 2016), accompanied by an editorial stating “there are few examples in clinical medicine where molecular reasoning has been rewarded with comparable success”. A new class of non-addictive pain medications, based largely on his work, is currently in Phase II clinical trials. He is now pinpointing “pain resilience” genes, and has identified an ion channel that controls joint degeneration in osteoarthritis (Nature, 2024).

Waxman has authored Spinal Cord Compression and Clinical Neuroanatomy (translated into 8 languages). He has served on multiple editorial boards including Annals of Neurology, Brain, Journal of Physiology, Trends in Molecular Medicine, and Nature Reviews Neurology. He is the Editor of The Neuroscientist. His trainees lead research teams around the world.

Dr. Waxman is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of NINDS. His honors include the Dystel Prize and Wartenberg Award (Amer. Acad. of Neurology), the Middleton Award and Magnuson Award (Veterans Admin/), and the Soriano Award (Amer. Neurol. Assn). He was honored with the British Physiological Society’s Annual Prize, an accolade he shares with his heroes Nobel Prize laureates Andrew Huxley, John Eccles, and Alan Hodgkin. Most recently, Waxman received the Julius Axelrod Prize (Soc. for Neuroscience), and the Mitchell Max Award (Amer. Acad. of Neurology)