Salim Yusuf


Salim Yusuf, is an Indian-born Canadian physician, the Marion W. Burke Chair in Cardiovascular Disease at McMaster University Medical School. He is a cardiologist and epidemiologist.

Early life and education

Born in the town of Kottarakkara in Kerala, Yusuf studied medicine at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore and earned a DPhil at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. At Oxford, he also took part in research into cardiovascular disease.
His doctoral thesis was titled "Beta adrenergic blockade in myocardial infarction" and his supervisor was Peter Sleight.

Career

In 1984, Yusuf moved to the National Institutes of Health in the United States, where he led clinical trials that showed the value of ACE inhibitors in people with left ventricular dysfunction and the optimal use of digoxin). He came to the McMaster school of medicine in 1992 as director of the cardiology division. In 1999 McMaster created the Population Health Research Institute at the Hamilton Health Sciences campus of McMaster, and made Yusuf the director of the center and vice president of research at HHS.
From 1999 to 2004, he also held an appointment as a senior scientist at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
In 2011, he was the world's second-most cited researcher. Yusuf's large-scale clinical trials have had a significant impact on the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.
He was president of the World Congress of Cardiology in 2015 and 2016.
In 2017 he was criticized for claiming that saturated fats had no impact on heart disease, while at the same time admitting that he was not an expert in nutrition; he had been criticized earlier for making claims about salt and cardiovascular disease outside of the medical mainstream.

Honours

In 2013, Yusuf was named an Officer in the Order of Canada. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2014, he was awarded the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award and was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.