Rajiv (“Raj”) Ratan received his B.A. in Neuroscience (Magna Cum Laude) from Amherst College in 1981 and received the John Woodruff Simpson Fellowship in Medicine. He completed an M.D. and Ph.D. at the New York University School of Medicine where he graduated as a member of AOA in 1988. He completed his Ph.D. with Dr. Michael Shelanski (Chair of Pathology at Columbia University) and Dr. Frederick Maxfield (Chair of Biochemistry at Cornell) where he focused on novel methods to monitor calcium gradients in living cells.
He completed an Internship in Medicine at the University of Chicago and was a Neurology resident and then Chief Resident in Neurology at Johns Hopkins (1991-1992). He was awarded the Jay Slotkin Award for excellence in research while a resident; and subsequently received the Passano Foundation Clinician Scientist Award while completing a fellowship in Neurorehabilitation and a post-doc in the Department of Neuroscience at Hopkins. In 1994, he was promoted to Assistant Professor of Neurology and Rehab Medicine at Hopkins and he started his own lab with the help of his post-doc mentor, Jay Baraban.
In 1996, he was recruited to set up the Neuroprotection Laboratory in the Department of Neurology and Program in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School (Harvard Institutes of Medicine and Beth Israel Hospital). He became an Associate Professor at Harvard in 1999.
In 2002, Dr. Ratan moved to Burke to Direct the Research Institute. He was formally appointed the Winifred Masterson Burke Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Medical College in 2004 and named an Associate Dean for the medical college in 2011.

Gou Young Koh is a distinguished professor at KAIST Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering, and the director of the Center for Vascular Research, Institute for Basic Science. He is also an external member of Max-Plank Institute. For the last 25 years, he has focused on the discovery and understanding of the growth factors regulating micro-vasculatures including tumor vasculature. During this time, his research team has made numerous major advances and breakthroughs in the field of angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis. Notably, he and his research team discovered and generated several novel and potent modulators of angiogenesis – three angiopoietin-like proteins, COMP-Ang1, DAAP and ABTAA – based on their keen observations and creative ideas. Moreover, he and his team have made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of the unique features and regulations of tumor vessels as well as on the characterization of key factors involved in organotypic angiogenesis and vascular maintenance. Lately, they have performed landmark studies in uncovering critical regulators for maintaining the integrity of specialized lymphatic vessels such as meningeal lymphatic vessels. By recognition of his outstanding and excellent achievements and contributions to biomedical communities, he became laureates of the Kyung-Am Prize (2011), Asan Award in Medicine (2012), and Ho-Am Prize in Medicine (2018).

Recent evidence indicates that enhancing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) outflow could alleviate the onset and progression of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, by improving brain clearance. Although the re-discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels as a new route of CSF drainage has led to an explosive advance in our understanding of the regulation and roles of CSF outflow, the main lymphatics responsible for CSF outflow has been elusive. I will introduce novel and main lymphatics for CSF outflow in this meeting. Moreover, I will provide evidence for facilitating CSF outflow through the cervical lymphatics as an extracranial and non-invasive approach.