Clifford Woolf elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society

BOSTON, MA [May 27, 2026] - Clifford Woolf, MB, BCh, PhD, has been elected as fellow of the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national academy of sciences. Woolf, whose research has broken new ground in understanding pain and neurodegenerative diseases, is among 90 researchers from across the world elected to this year's cohort.

Fellows are elected based on their substantial contributions to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science. Previous notable fellows include Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Dorothy Hodgkin.

Woolf has spearheaded discoveries on how synaptic plasticity, altered excitability, structural reorganization of synaptic architecture, injury-induced transcriptional changes, neuro-immune interactions, and activity-dependent loss of inhibitory interneurons all contribute to the pathogenesis and maintenance of pathological pain. He has also pioneered new ways of phenotyping pain using machine learning.

His work has led to the identification of novel targets for analgesics, and, with Bruce Bean at Harvard Medical School, he has discovered both a way of producing a long-lasting local analgesia and cough suppression and also the advantages of a polypharmacological approach for the development of effective analgesics with no abuse liability. With NCATS he has identified a way of converting human-induced pluripotent stem cells into pain-triggering sensory neurons for disease modeling and analgesic screening, and is also using this to identify new treatments for neuropathy.

Additionally, Dr. Woolf has explored how axonal injury activates a survival and regeneration program in sensory and motor neurons, and he has identified the transcription factors that act as master regulators of these. This has led to novel genetic approaches to increase regeneration, and which together with neuroprotective interventions may ameliorate motor neuron diseases like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).