Vinod Menon

Dr. Menon is the Rachel L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and, Professor, by courtesy, of Neurology & Neurological Sciences and Education at Stanford University. Dr. Menon is director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, which seeks to advance fundamental knowledge of human brain function and dysfunction, and to use this knowledge to help children and adults with psychiatric and neurological disorders. Research in Dr. Menon's lab emphasizes a tight integration of cognitive, behavioral, neuroscience and computational methodologies. Students and researchers in his lab come from a wide range of disciplines, including psychiatry, neurology, psychology, neuroscience, electrical and biomedical engineering, and computer science, to conduct research in a highly interdisciplinary setting.

Dr. Menon received his BSc (Honors) in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology and his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He did a postdoctoral fellowship in neurophysiology at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Prof. Walter J. Freeman, III. He came to Stanford University as a Sinclair Foundation Research Fellow and joined the faculty in 2000.

Over the past two decades, Dr. Menon’s research has led to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the architecture, function, and development of these large-scale distributed human brain networks. Dr. Menon and his team were among the first to discover that the human brain is organized into specialized and interacting networks of brain regions, which has resulted in a paradigm shift in how we investigate human brain function and cognition. Virtually every psychiatric and neurological disorder has been probed with the scientific framework Dr. Menon and his team first developed. This includes discovery of the default mode, frontoparietal, and salience networks, and their functions, which have led to elucidation of how deficits in access, engagement and disengagement of large-scale brain networks play a prominent role in psychopathology, providing novel insights into brain mechanisms underlying cognitive, affective, and social function and dysfunction that cut across multiple neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Menon’s research has been cited over 90,000 times, with an h-index of 125 (Google Scholar). Dr. Menon is a ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Neuroscience (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018; ISI, Thompson Reuters), and in 2019 and 2020 he was named an ISI Highly Cited Researcher with Cross-Field impact.