Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Ian Wenker, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology
Transcript
What I love is coming in every day here at UVA. It's such a creative process doing research, and I love sharing it with the people I work with, such smart and passionate people here at UVA, both that work for me and those I collaborate with across campus. I also enjoy engaging with the community. I work with a number of patient populations across the country, where they give me a lot of feedback on what we're doing and they're excited about the work we do, which just reinvigorates me to do all that we can every day. My name is Ian Wenker. I'm an assistant professor in the anesthesiology department. My overall research focus for years has been understanding how the brain controls automatic processes that we all do, like breathing, cardiovascular function, heart rate, things like that. And right now, a big focus of the lab is trying to understand how the brain contributes to what's called sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. So people with epilepsy-unfortunately some fraction of them- will experience this where they're found deceased and we don't understand yet why. And so in the lab, we’re trying to understand what the mechanisms of that are. And it's still early stages, but we've been making good progress and we're hopeful to make an impact. So our work on SUDEP, or sudden unexpected death in epilepsy is basic in that we're trying to understand mechanisms that create this fatal complication in epilepsy. And we're hopeful that once we understand these mechanisms, we’ll be able to translate them into therapies so that the people who are taking care of those with epilepsy will be able to intervene and save their life, and this will allow them to hopefully sleep better at night and be able to better take care of their loved ones.
Ian Wenker, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology
Transcript
What I love is coming in every day here at UVA. It's such a creative process doing research, and I love sharing it with the people I work with, such smart and passionate people here at UVA, both that work for me and those I collaborate with across campus. I also enjoy engaging with the community. I work with a number of patient populations across the country, where they give me a lot of feedback on what we're doing and they're excited about the work we do, which just reinvigorates me to do all that we can every day. My name is Ian Wenker. I'm an assistant professor in the anesthesiology department. My overall research focus for years has been understanding how the brain controls automatic processes that we all do, like breathing, cardiovascular function, heart rate, things like that. And right now, a big focus of the lab is trying to understand how the brain contributes to what's called sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. So people with epilepsy-unfortunately some fraction of them- will experience this where they're found deceased and we don't understand yet why. And so in the lab, we’re trying to understand what the mechanisms of that are. And it's still early stages, but we've been making good progress and we're hopeful to make an impact. So our work on SUDEP, or sudden unexpected death in epilepsy is basic in that we're trying to understand mechanisms that create this fatal complication in epilepsy. And we're hopeful that once we understand these mechanisms, we’ll be able to translate them into therapies so that the people who are taking care of those with epilepsy will be able to intervene and save their life, and this will allow them to hopefully sleep better at night and be able to better take care of their loved ones.
