Ravi S. Menon

Ravi Shankar Menon (born 1964) is a Canadian-American biophysicist. He is a former Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging at the University of Western Ontario and director of the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping at the Robarts Research Institute.

Early life and education

Menon was born in 1964 and lived in West Virginia, Virginia, Hawaii, Bombay and Maryland before graduating from University Hill Secondary School in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was born into an academic family as his mother was an electrical engineer and his father was an astronomer. Menon completed his entire post-secondary education in Canada. His Bachelor of Science degree was at the University of British Columbia, his Master of Science degree was at McGill University, and his PhD was at the University of Alberta. His thesis at the University of Alberta was conducted under the supervision of Peter S. Allen in 1990 and titled Some mechanisms of water proton NMR relaxation in model tissue systems. Following this, Menon completed his post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota where he was heavily involved in the development of a brain imaging technique called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with Seiji Ogawa and David W. Tank of Bell Labs and Menon's post-doctoral supervisor, Kamil Ugurbil. The aim of the technique was to measure changing blood flow and oxygenation to observe brain function.

Career

Following his post-doctoral fellowship, Menon joined the Robarts Research Institute to develop techniques to gather better images of the brain with MRIs through fMRI. By 2002, Menon was an associate professor in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) and held a Canada Research Chair in Functional Neuroimaging.