Rajiv R. Ratan, M.D., Ph.D.

Rajiv (“Raj”) Ratan received his B.A. in Neuroscience (Magna Cum Laude) from Amherst College in 1981 and received the John Woodruff Simpson Fellowship in Medicine. He completed an M.D. and Ph.D. at the New York University School of Medicine where he graduated as a member of AOA in 1988. He completed his Ph.D. with Dr. Michael Shelanski (Chair of Pathology at Columbia University) and Dr. Frederick Maxfield (Chair of Biochemistry at Cornell) where he focused on novel methods to monitor calcium gradients in living cells.

He completed an Internship in Medicine at the University of Chicago and was a Neurology resident and then Chief Resident in Neurology at Johns Hopkins (1991-1992). He was awarded the Jay Slotkin Award for excellence in research while a resident; and subsequently received the Passano Foundation Clinician Scientist Award while completing a fellowship in Neurorehabilitation and a post-doc in the Department of Neuroscience at Hopkins. In 1994, he was promoted to Assistant Professor of Neurology and Rehab Medicine at Hopkins and he started his own lab with the help of his post-doc mentor, Jay Baraban.

In 1996, he was recruited to set up the Neuroprotection Laboratory in the Department of Neurology and Program in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School (Harvard Institutes of Medicine and Beth Israel Hospital). He became an Associate Professor at Harvard in 1999.

In 2002, Dr. Ratan moved to Burke to Direct the Research Institute. He was formally appointed the Winifred Masterson Burke Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Medical College in 2004 and named an Associate Dean for the medical college in 2011.