Gautam Menon

Gautam Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University.

He served as Dean (Research) at Ashoka between 2022 and 2025 and was also Director of Ashoka’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) during that period.

He is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on “Strengthening the use of Epidemiological Modelling of Pandemic Diseases”, a co-author of the “Lancet Commission on a Citizen-centred Health System for India” and a member of the WHO “Technical Advisory Group on Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy.”

He completed a BSc (Hons) in physics at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, an MSc from IIT Kanpur, and a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Prior to joining Ashoka, he was a Professor with both the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, where he was also the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He joined IMSc following post-doctoral research and teaching at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He was a Visiting Professor at the Mechanobiology Institute and the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore (2011 – 2013). He was an Adjunct Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (2019 – 2022).

He serves on the scientific review committees of several international and national agencies, including the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, as well as on a number of national committees. He was a Member of the Expert Group (Education) for the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of India (2020).