Eugene Braunwald

Eugene Braunwald is the Distinguished Hersey Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the founding Chair of the TIMI Study Group at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Dr Braunwald received his medical training at New York University and completed his Medical Residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He served as Clinical Director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

His early work focused on the control of ventricular function and he was the first to measure both left ventricular ejection fraction and left ventricular dp/dt in patients. His group showed the first neurohumoral defect in human heart failure, defined the pathophysiology of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and demonstrated salvage of ischemic myocardium following coronary occlusion. They defined myocardial stunning and ventricular remodeling following myocardial infarction. For the past 30 years, he and his colleagues at the TIMI Study Group demonstrated improved patient survival with a patent coronary artery which led to the widely accepted “open artery hypotheses.” They were the first to show the benefit of preventing adverse remodeling of the infarcted ventricle with ACE inhibition.

Science Watch listed Dr Braunwald as the most frequently cited author in Cardiology; he has an H index of 196. Dr Braunwald has the Distinguished Scientist and Lifetime Achievement Awards of the American College of Cardiology, Research Achievement, and Herrick Awards of the American Heart Association, the Gold Medal of the European Society of Cardiology and is the recipient of twenty two honorary degrees from distinguished universities throughout the world. The living Nobel Prize winners in medicine voted Dr Braunwald as “the person who has contributed the most to cardiology in recent years”.