[9] He completed his BA in Neuroscience from Amherst College in 1981 graduating magna cum laude and received the John Woodruff Simpson Fellowship in Medicine.

[17] He taught a course in the New Pathway and a seminar course on Transcriptional Mechanisms of Neuronal Death and Survival in Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School.

[9][18] Ratan joined the Burke Neurological Institute in 2003 as its second director He has been on the advisory board of the Dana Brain Health Alliance since 2012.Ratan became a member of the Faculty of 1000, Neurorehabilitation in 2015, and cofounded a novel clinical trials platform called NeuroCuresNY in 2019.

[19] The central focus of the Ratan laboratory's work is to understand adaptive programs that facilitate the brain's ability to combat injury and to foster repair.

[22][23] In his research, he has worked with undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and has taught a seminar course at Harvard Medical School on the "Transcriptional regulation of survival and death in neurons".

[24][25][26] It was reviewed by Acta Neurologica Belgicathat that wrote "this volume broadly covers the field of neuronal death, and the large number of (mostly) up to date references make this a very useful textbook.

[31][8] Ratan has been the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Partnership in Stroke Recovery in Canada; he has served on NIH Study Sections; and he Co-Chaired the Gordon Conference on Oxidative Stress in Ventura, California in March 2015.

[13] In collaboration with Mark Noble and Marie Filbin, he was principal investigator of an eleven institution Center of Research Excellence in Spinal Cord Injury funded via a $15 million from the New York State Department of Health.