Raymond Vahan Damadian is a famous inventor, currently the creator of the magnetic resonance imaging device known as the magnetic resonance tomograph.

Damadian was born in 1936 in New York to Vahan Damadian and Odette Yezinjyian, who survived the Armenian genocide. Despite this discovery, which played a revolutionary role in medicine, Damadian was dishonorably denied the Nobel Prize when it was awarded to scientists who have made a great contribution to the development of the field of MRI. 

However, Damadian received the US State Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and received the Lemelson Prize from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the invention of the MRI video recorder. His first piece of equipment, named “Unbridled,” is housed in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.