President and CEO

Dr. John Rasure has been President and CEO of the Mind Research Network since 2005. His leadership has been instrumental in establishing financial stability and a business strategy that has brought growth and long-term sustainability to the organization.

This successful strategy is evidenced by the fact that the MRN has increased the number of employees from 54 to over 180 during the past four years, and has obtained over $100 million in contracts and grants. Dr. Rasure’s strategy includes the recruitment of top-notch researchers to MRN, who in turn bring funding and jobs.  His approach translates into an immediate economic development success; it brings additional research capacity to the organization and additional high-tech jobs to Albuquerque.

But most importantly, this strategy helps Dr. Rasure fulfill his personal ambition, which is to move research from conceptualization to commercialization. Not because of the obvious economic benefits, but because if successful, viable products will be developed for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and brain diseases. As Dr. Rasure says, “Research isn’t about collecting plaques and being published, it’s about impacting somebody’s life; it’s about making a difference.”

Dr. Rasure began his career at the University of New Mexico (UNM) professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In a few short years, he had been published extensively, secured more than $3 million in funding, and earned early promotion and tenure by building an internationally respected software research laboratory. His areas of expertise were real-time image processing architectures, visual programming, medical imaging, and remote sensing. During this time, he also launched the Khoros Consortium, a world-wide organization established to fund and develop Khoros, an open software system for visual programming and image processing.

In 1992, Dr. Rasure left UNM to found Khoral Research Inc. (KRI), allowing him to continue the development of the Khoros system. With backing from the Department of Defense, Khoros became the government’s standard software platform for developing automatic target-recognition systems.

Dr. Rasure left KRI after four years to open and run the Albuquerque Division of Photon Research Associates (PRA), a San Diego-based government R&D company. As chief scientist, he directed the company’s transition to a physical and engineering sciences software development company. This successful transition resulted in the commercialization of several of PRA’s radar and infrared software products which led to Dr. Rasure’s founding of EarthScan Network Inc. in 1999, where he was responsible for commercializing technology he developed to automatically process multispectral imagery and distribute derived images via the Internet.

A $6 million joint venture between PRA and Data Transmission Network, EarthScan was acquired after three years by PRA because its web-based remote-sensing technology was more marketable to the government than to the commercial market. As Vice President for Business Development at PRA, he was responsible for growing business in the areas of visual simulation, geographic information systems, and remote sensing.

Dr. Rasure received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Kansas State University and a master’s degree in the same discipline from Stanford.