OASIS 3 CREATE

Salim Yusuf

Executive Director; Senior Scientist

Salim Yusuf is an internationally renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist, whose work over 40 years has substantially influenced prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Born in India, medically qualified at St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore in 1976, he received a Rhodes Scholarship and obtained a DPhil from Oxford, during which he (along with Richard Peto, Rory Collins and Peter Sleight) initiated the concepts of large, simple trials, and meta-analysis. He proposed the concept of combination drug treatment for prevention of CVD to achieve large reductions in CVD with a single pill (now called the polypill concept), but more importantly has been evaluating the concept through large randomized trials.

He leads several global studies involving more than 60 countries in every inhabited continent of the world aimed at enhancing knowledge about the biological, behavioural and societal causes, consequences, and approaches to the control of heart diseases, and strokes through large multi-country programs such as INTERHEART, INTERSTROKE, and PURE.

He holds a Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario Research Chair and has received (among others) the Lifetime Research Achievement award of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society; the Paul Wood Silver Medal of the British Cardiac Society; the European Society of Cardiology gold medal, the clinical Research Prize of the American Heart Association and the International Award and the Braunwald Lecture of the American College of Cardiology. He has been inducted into the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame; been appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and received the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award in 2014. He has received four honorary doctorates, and is among the top 20 most cited health researchers in history.

Salim Yusuf has published more than 1,000 articles in refereed journals, rising to the second most cited researcher in the world for 2011. He has mentored more than 120 scientists, several of whom are in leadership positions across the globe. He has been President of the World Heart Federation (2015-2016), where he initiated several programs (the Emerging Leaders program, road maps for CVD control and a course for training primary care practitioners in CVD prevention) aimed at halving the CVD burden globally within a generation. The World Heart Federation has recognized his contributions by naming the program the Salim Yusuf Emerging Leaders Programme.

He is a Distinguished University Professor of Medicine, and Executive Director of the Population Health Research Institute, McMaster University and Chief Scientist, Hamilton Health Sciences.

Shamir Mehta

Senior Scientist

Shamir Mehta is a Senior Scientist with the Acute Coronary Syndrome and Interventional Cardiology research program at PHRI, a Professor of Medicine at McMaster University, and Director of the Interventional Cardiology program at Hamilton Health Sciences. His research focuses on the role and timing of invasive therapies in patients with acute ischemic heart disease, and the evaluation of novel antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapies in these patients.

He has led several large pragmatic randomized trials evaluating invasive interventional strategies in patients with acute coronary syndromes. He has also lead multinational randomized trials evaluating novel antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapies to improve outcomes in patients experiencing a heart attack.

Shamir Mehta has published 127 original research papers in several medical journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, and Circulation. His success in research has earned him a coveted Canada’s Top 40 under 40TM award in 2004, and he has received a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Career Award.