Anil Menon also spent a year in India as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar to study and support polio vaccination.
Born to Ukrainian and Indian immigrants, a lieutenant colonel with the US Air Force and SpaceX's first flight surgeon, Indian-origin Anil Menon, has now been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) among the 10 new astronauts who could fly to the Moon someday.
Who is Anil Menon?
Anil Menon, son of an Indian immigrant, was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and had also helped launch the Elon Musk-run SpaceX's first humans to space during the 'Demo-2' mission and built a medical organisation to support the human system during future missions.
He also spent a year in India as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar to study and support polio vaccination. Before that, Menon served as the crew flight surgeon for various expeditions taking astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). At Harvard University, Menon studied neurobiology and researched Huntington's disease.
He attended Stanford Medical School where he studied engineering and medicine and worked on coding soft tissue models at NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley, California.
Menon is an actively practicing emergency medicine physician with fellowship training in wilderness and aerospace medicine. As a physician, he was the first responder during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the 2011 Reno Air Show accident.
In the Air Force, Menon supported the 45th Space Wing as a flight surgeon and the 173rd Fighter Wing, where he logged over 100 sorties in the F-15 fighter jet and transported over 100 patients as part of the critical care air transport team.
The US space agency announced the selection of its newest class of astronauts late on Monday - six men and four women were chosen from more than 12,000 people who applied to the space agency in March of 2020.
Once they train and become full astronauts, they will have some exciting spaceflight opportunities ahead of them, potentially including flights to the Moon someday.
He will report for duty in January 2022 to complete two years of initial astronaut training as a NASA astronaut candidate.
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 "Meet Anil Menon, one among 10 new astronauts picked by NASA for Moon mission")
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