Gopinathan K. Menon obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Baroda, India, and also held a faculty position in the same university. In 1979, he spent a year as a Homi Bhabha Fellow and Visiting Professor at Michigan State University where he trained in electron microscopy of skin. In a subsequent sabbatical at the Elias laboratory in University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), from 1982-1984, he began his focus on skin barrier, and in 1988 moved to San Francisco as a full-time Research Faculty in Dermatology at UCSF. From 1993 to 2017, he held various research positions in the personal care industry in the United States, including Principal Research Fellow & Head, Skin Biology Research at Avon Products and Senior Research Fellow at International Specialty Products (later merged with Ashland, Inc.). Presently, he is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco.
His Honors include being awarded a Homi Bhabha Fellowship, elected as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Barrier Function of Mammalian Skin (2011), and induction to the GRC Chairs’ Hall of Fame (2012). He has been an invited speaker at several national and international meetings, and has over a hundred publications that include peer reviewed research papers, reviews, and book chapters.