John Joseph Valentine McMurray, Professor of Medical Cardiology and convener for clinical research in the Institute of Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK and Salim Yusuf, Professor of Medicine, Executive Director of the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.
John J. V. McMurray was born in Enniskillen in the north of Ireland in 1958. He attended Manchester University from where he graduated B.Sc. (Hons) in 1980 and MB ChB (Hons) in 1983. He undertook a period of postgraduate research at the University of Dundee, with award of his research MD in 1990. He trained in Medicine and Cardiology in Manchester, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow and was appointed as Consultant Cardiologist in Edinburgh in 1993 before moving to Glasgow in 1995. He is now Professor of Medical Cardiology and convener for clinical research in the Institute of Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. He is also Lead Consultant Cardiologist at the Western Infirmary, Glasgow.
He is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association as well as the medical Royal Colleges in Edinburgh and Glasgow and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and UK Academy of Medical Sciences. He has lectured widely and won several awards, including the Stokes Medal of the Irish Cardiac Society. Professor McMurray served as the inaugural Eugene Braunwald Scholar in Cardiovascular Disease at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and visiting Professor of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts USA (August 2010 – July 2011). He is Past-President of the Heart Failure Association of the ESC.
His primary research interests are in heart failure, coronary heart disease, atrial fibrillation and the cardiovascular consequences of diabetes and chronic kidney disease, with a focus on clinical trials and epidemiology.
Professor McMurray’s main research activity is clinical trials and he is, or was, the principal investigator, member of the executive committee or steering committee member in a number of large trials in heart failure, other cardiovascular diseases, renal disease and diabetes. He has also participated in many data monitoring/safety committees. He chairs the event adjudication group at Glasgow University which has served as the endpoint committee for many trials.
He has published approximately 700 original papers, reviews, and book chapters, including several in leading medical (e.g. Goldman Cecil’s) and cardiology textbooks (e.g. The ESC Textbook on Cardiovascular Medicine). He is the primary author or editor of thirteen books.
Professor McMurray has been a member and chair of many guideline committees, including chairman of the 2012 ESC Heart Failure Task-Force. Professor McMurray was recently appointed to National Institute for Health and Care Excellence-NICE (appraisal committee A).
He sits on the editorial board of several leading cardiovascular journals, including European Heart Journal and European Journal of Heart Failure (where he is an Associate Editor) and is also a member of the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Professor McMurray was recently identified as one of the 400 most influential biomedical researchers in the world and the only cardiovascular researcher on this list from the UK (Boyack KW, Klavans R, Sorensen AA, Ioannidis JP. A list of highly influential biomedical researchers,1996-2011. Eur J Clin Invest. 2013; 43:1339- 65). He was also included in the new 2014 Highly Cited Researchers listing and one of The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014 by Thomson Reuters (http://thomsonreuters.com/articles/2014/worlds- most-influential-scientific-minds-2014). His current H-index is 135 (Google Scholar, May 2015 http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=n0ZdRMoAAAAJ&hl=en).
Salim Yusuf, Professor of Medicine, Executive Director of the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) and Chief Scientist, Hamilton Health Sciences, was born in India on November 26, 1952.
Salim Yusuf is an internationally renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist, whose work over 35 years has substantially improved the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease, thereby benefitting millions of people.
Medically qualified in Bangalore in 1976, he received a Rhodes Scholarship and obtained a DPhil from Oxford, during which he (along with Richard Peto and Peter Sleight) initiated the concepts of large, simple trials, and meta-analysis. He coordinated the ISIS trial (which set the structure for future international collaborative work in cardiovascular disease) that demonstrated the value of beta-blockers in myocardial infarction, and serves on the steering committees for all subsequent ISIS trials. In 1984, following clinical training in Medicine and Cardiology in the UK, he moved to the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA, where he was a leader in their SOLVD trial (establishing the value of ACE-inhibitors in heart failure and LV dysfunction) and DIG trial (clarifying the role of digitalis). These trials served as the model for a large number of major trials in heart failure resulting in substantial improvements in mortality.
In 1992 he moved to McMaster University, where he has established an international program of research in cardiovascular diseases and prevention, culminating in the creation of the Population Health Research Institute.
He holds a Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario Research Chair, was a Senior Scientist of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (1999-2004), and has received 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 American Heart Association Clinical Research Award, the Eugene Braunwald Lecturer of the American College of Cardiology in 2014, and over 50 other international and national awards for research. He has been inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada (equivalent to the knighthood), and in 2014 he received the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award, and was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wroclaw, Poland in 2015.
He has published over 950 articles in refereed journals, was the second most cited researcher in the world for 2011 and has several times been in the top 20 cited scientists. His h-index is 162 (129,850 citations). He is President of the World Heart Federation, where he is initiating an Emerging Leaders program in 100 countries and a Roadmap to reduce the CVD burden globally within a generation.