24th Annual Safar Symposium

46th Peter and Eva Safar Lecture for the Sciences and Humanities:
Professor David K. Menon, CBE, FMedSci
Director of Research, Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge

David Menon is Director of Research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Following two terms as a Senior Investigator in the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), he was appointed Emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator in 2019. He is a Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Professorial Life Fellow in the Medical Sciences at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His academic and clinical achievements led to appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 2024. He founded the Neurosciences Critical Care Unit (NCCU) at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he established the first recognised training programme for specialist neurocritical care in the UK. Protocols developed in the Addenbrooke’s NCCU have been shown to improve clinical outcome in severe head injury and rationalise the management of acute intracranial haemorrhage.

He jointly leads the EU-funded £34 million CENTER-TBI Consortium and the $14 million multi-funder UK national Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Research Platform (TBI-REPORTER) and stepped down from his role as Coordinator of the International Traumatic Brain Injury Research Initiative (InTBIR) in 2026. He jointly led the Lancet Neurology Commissions on TBI in 2017 and 2022 and was Executive Editor of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group Report on Acquired Brain Injury in 2019. He has been applicant or co-applicant on awarded grants totalling over $60 million. He has over 650 peer-reviewed publications, with an ‘h’ index of over 150 (Google Scholar) and has been continuously rated as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate since 2021. The Acute Brain Injury Program at Cambridge, which he founded, has supported over 60 PhD studentships, and nurtured several senior investigators across clinical and basic neuroscience.