Professor Roger Ordidge studied physics at the University of Nottingham, and went on to obtain his PhD in 1981 under the supervision of Professor Sir Peter Mansfield. He worked on echo-planar imaging, a high speed imaging technique which helped make Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) possible, and was the first person to generate a moving image of the beating heart.

After four years in industry working on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy as related to body metabolism, Professor Ordidge briefly returned to Nottingham in 1986 before taking up a post in the US at Oakland University, Detroit, to study the process of stroke damage. In 1994, he became Joel Professor Physics Applied to Medicine, at UCL, a position which he still holds. His research focuses on the development and application to clinical research of MRI technology and he has patented several of the widely used methods currently used in MRI scanners such as improvements in radio-frequency (RF) slice definition using FOCI RF pulses. He is particularly interested in studying the brain in stroke and in neonatal birth asphyxia.

Professor Ordidge was a founding member of the British Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and in 2006 was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.