Jeffrey J. Iliff

American neuroscientist. Associate Director for Research at the University of Washington VISN 20 Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center, and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. PhD from Oregon Health & Science University. Did his postdoctoral and early faculty work with Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester, where he was first author on the founding glymphatic paper; moved to OHSU and then to UW.

Stake§

Iliff's stake is scientific and clinical-translational, with particular focus on the role of glymphatic dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury, and sleep disorders. The Veterans Affairs position at UW connects the research to a specific clinical population (veteran TBI and Alzheimer's) and to substantial federal research funding. He has continued collaborating with Nedergaard while building his own laboratory programme.

The 2012 Science Translational Medicine paper is the first-author work that established the glymphatic-system framework. Iliff was a postdoctoral fellow with Nedergaard at the time, and the two-photon imaging that revealed the paravascular CSF-to- interstitial flow pattern was the technical contribution he brought to the collaboration. The paper's combination of fluorescent-tracer imaging with aquaporin-4 knockout experiments gave the model the empirical specificity that purely descriptive work could not have produced.

The post-2012 work at OHSU and UW has built specific clinical- translational programmes on traumatic brain injury (where glymphatic dysfunction may explain post-concussive symptoms), on ageing (where the glymphatic system declines), and on the sleep-glymphatic-Alzheimer's connection that Xie 2013 established. The University of Washington position gives him access to veteran patient populations whose TBI prevalence makes the clinical work particularly tractable.

Iliff occupies the second-generation glymphatic-research role: the figure who turned the Nedergaard framework into a clinical- translational programme with specific disease applications. The work is careful; the broader field's debates about the bulk-flow model apply to his programme as they apply to Nedergaard's. The clinical-trial work on glymphatic-targeted interventions is ongoing.