“Dr. Peter Kim Nelson is famous,” noted a distinguished neurosurgeon who once introduced him to a group of trainees, “but you might not know who he is.”

Indeed, while Dr. Nelson heads two neurointerventional services—one at NYU Langone Health and another at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue—his reputation stems as much from his scientific ingenuity as it does from his clinical expertise.

In 2011, he introduced the first commercially available device to divert blood flow away from a brain aneurysm. The pipeline embolization device (PED), a braided cylindrical mesh tube implanted across the base, or neck, of the aneurysm, is a self-expanding mechanism that permanently seals off the opening.

An estimated 500,000 people worldwide die each year from ruptured brain aneurysms, half of them younger than 50. But there’s no estimate for how many lives have been saved by Dr. Nelson’s device, developed and refined with assistance from more than a dozen colleagues at NYU Langone and engineers at Medtronic Inc.

Large, wide-necked aneurysms are particularly challenging to treat. The few surgical options available carry the risks of damage to other blood vessels, recurrence, rebleeding, and stroke. “The diverter established a new vanguard for safe and effective management of complex cerebral aneurysms,” says Dr. Nelson. “Its beauty is that it evolves with the diseased blood vessel and normalizes it.”