Two University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) faculty members have been named to the 2023 class of National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Senior Members.

Moon Nahm, M.D., and Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., were today announced as new honorees.

“NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists, and administrators from NAI Member Institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society,” according to an NAI release announcing the honorees. “They also have growing success in patents, licensing, and commercialization, while educating and mentoring the next generation of inventors.” 

Nahm is a professor emeritus in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy & Critical Care Medicine in UAB Heersink School of Medicine (HSOM) Department of Medicine, while Niederweis is a professor in the HSOM Department of Microbiology.

The 2023 class of Senior Members includes 95 inductees, the largest to date. The inductees are named inventors on more than 1,200 issued U.S. Patents.

Nahm is a named inventor on seven U.S. Patents, while Niederweis is a named inventor on 10 U.S. Patents.

Nahm’s work focuses on bacterial pathogenesis, specifically Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae), and vaccine development. S. pneumonia causes pneumococcal disease, which results in the death of more than 22,000 people in the United States each year. Rapidly emerging pneumococcal serotypes require constant upgrading of the vaccine, and Nahm’s work, in which he has developed an inexpensive yet rapid assay to test whether potential vaccines effectively elicit the antibodies needed to kill the S. pneumonia bacteria, is essential to increasing vaccine coverage.

Niederweis’ research focuses on the protein Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A (MspA), which forms nanopores on the outer membrane of mycobacteria, allowing for the influx of small hydrophilic molecules. These protein nanopores are currently being used in fast and inexpensive DNA sequencing, and Niederweis’ MspA nanopore is the most efficient nanopore in existence for such DNA sequencing.

The 2023 class of Senior Members will be celebrated at NAI’s Annual Meeting, which will be June 25-27 in Washington, D.C. 

The NAI is a member organization comprising U.S. and international universities, and governmental and non-profit research institutes, with more than 4,000 individual inventor members and Fellows spanning more than 250 institutions worldwide. It was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate and mentor innovative students and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society.