Dr. Dayan Goodenowe has been named among the top seven experts to watch in 2026, recognized in a feature profiling seven doctors, lawyers, and founders whose work is changing how Americans approach health, money, justice, and relationships.
Dr. Goodenowe appears in the brain health category as “one of the foremost voices explaining the science” behind a rapidly growing area of inquiry: the role of plasmalogens in cognitive aging.
A different line of inquiry
For three decades, mainstream Alzheimer’s research has been dominated by the amyloid hypothesis. Billions have been spent, and the results, by most measures, have been disappointing. Dr. Goodenowe has spent that same period pursuing a different question: what role do plasmalogens, a class of phospholipids essential to brain health and cellular function, play in how the brain ages?
His 2007 peer-reviewed paper linking plasmalogens to cognitive aging has been followed by a steady stream of converging research. The feature highlights independent findings from groups associated with the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Memory Center, alongside Scientific American’s coverage at the 2018 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. It also recognizes Dr. Goodenowe’s 2021 book Breaking Alzheimer’s, his founding of Prodrome Sciences, and his patents in plasmalogen biochemistry and the mass-spectrometry technology used to measure thousands of biochemicals from a single sample.
Why now
Consumer interest in longevity, cognitive performance, and biohacking has brought plasmalogens into the mainstream conversation about brain aging. After three decades of work, this is research whose moment has arrived.