I am actually a research scientist working on NDN (Named-data Networking). Van certainly was the founder of NDN and is often consulted to remind us about his vision for the network, but the torch really has been passed to the other PIs; most notably Lixia Zhang[1], another early-Internet pioneer. It's very exciting work, and a lot of things need re-inventing when you totally invert the networking protocol like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lixia_Zhang