J. Nick Brenton, MD, Studies the Environmental Factors That May Impact Multiple Sclerosis. @UVASchoolofMedicine

Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

J. Nick Brenton, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Neurology

J. Nick Brenton, MD, Studies the Environmental Factors That May Impact Multiple Sclerosis.

$Ian Wenker, PhD: Understanding the Brain and Preventing Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy Ian Wenker, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology Transcript What I love is coming in every day here at UVA. Its such a creative process doing research, and I love sharing it with the people I work with, such smart and passionate people here at UVA, both that work for me and those I collaborate with across campus. I also enjoy engaging with the community. I work with a number of patient populations across the country, where they give me a lot of feedback on what were doing and theyre excited about the work we do, which just reinvigorates me to do all that we can every day. My name is Ian Wenker. Im an assistant professor in the anesthesiology department. My overall research focus for years has been understanding how the brain controls automatic processes that we all do, like breathing, cardiovascular function, heart rate, things like that. And right now, a big focus of the lab is trying to understand how the brain contributes to whats called sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. So people with epilepsy-unfortunately some fraction of them- will experience this where theyre found deceased and we dont understand yet why. And so in the lab, we’re trying to understand what the mechanisms of that are. And its still early stages, but weve been making good progress and were hopeful to make an impact. So our work on SUDEP, or sudden unexpected death in epilepsy is basic in that were trying to understand mechanisms that create this fatal complication in epilepsy. And were hopeful that once we understand these mechanisms, we’ll be able to translate them into therapies so that the people who are taking care of those with epilepsy will be able to intervene and save their life, and this will allow them to hopefully sleep better at night and be able to better take care of their loved ones.$

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