Mansoor Ijaz was born in Tallahassee, Florida, and grew up on a farm in Floyd County, Virginia [REF].
Ijaz received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Virginia in 1983[REF] and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985,[REF] where he was trained as a neural sciences engineer in the Harvard-MIT Medical Engineering Medical Physics Program (M.E.M.P.).