Ratan ’77 Inducted into Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars

Dr. Raj Ratan ’77 has been inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, which honors individuals who have achieved professional or scholarly distinction in their chosen field. It is a highly selective process and limited to only a handful of scholars, artists, and scientists each year. Inductees have spent a portion of their careers at Johns Hopkins and are nominated by peers amongst the faculty of Johns Hopkins University.

Raj is the executive director of the Burke Neurological Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine. His election was based on his training at Johns Hopkins leading to his current leadership position. In 1991 to 1992, Raj was a Neurology resident and then Chief Resident in Neurology at Johns Hopkins. 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.

At the Burke Neurological Institute, Raj’s scientific efforts have been primarily focused on understanding how neurons respond to physiological stresses, particularly oxidative stress, adaptively and maladaptively at a transcriptional level, and how the balance of these activities leads to neuronal death and impairment, or cell survival and recovery or resistance. During his career, he has published over 160 articles and has edited and contributed chapters to several books. He has received research grants from National Institutes of Health, The New York Department of Health, Dana Foundation and The Thomas Hartman Foundation among other international foundations. Raj’s studies have identified novel transcriptional and epigenetic strategies for limiting neuronal cell death which have identified novel small molecule approach which have been validated in numerous neurological disease models.

At Webb, Raj was a member of the Honor Committee and ASB. He worked on the Blue & Gold and El Espejo, serving as editor of the yearbook during his senior year. He then earned his B.A. in neuroscience from Amherst College and a M.D.-Ph.D. from New York University School of Medicine, where he was a NIH Medical Scientist Training Program Fellow. More recently, Raj chaired his Webb 40th reunion in 2017 and he shared his expertise with Webb faculty as we were developing curriculum for the new Advanced Studies neuroscience class.  

Details
July 17, 2020

13:11 PM PDT