We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2026 Louis & Artur Lucian Award for Research in Circulatory Diseases is Thomas Michel, MD.
Oregon-born Dr. Michel is a practising cardiologist and committed educator who served as the first Dean for Education at Harvard Medical School, where his innovative teaching programs helped to transform both medical student and graduate student education.
Dr. Michel is a leader of the Harvard-MIT MD-PhD program. He introduced the teaching of societal implications and social contexts of biochemical discoveries into graduate school courses across Harvard. He has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring, including the Braunwald Clinical Cardiology Teaching Award, the Baughman Faculty Mentoring Award, and the Jackson Distinguished Bedside Teaching Award. He was twice the recipient of the Shackleford Graduate School Teaching Award as the outstanding teacher in biological and biomedical sciences awarded by the HMS graduate students. He is a true exemplar of that rare breed of “triple threat” in academic medicine, with outstanding skills as a clinician, teacher and researcher.
He has a history of groundbreaking studies using biochemical and cell biological approaches to understand signal transduction pathways in the cardiovascular system, and has been continuously funded by the National Institutes for Health for more than two decades.
His group focused on endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), a signalling enzyme involved in the control of vascular tone and platelet aggregation. He reported the molecular cloning and characterization of eNOS and discovered that eNOS undergoes a complex pattern of post-translational regulation which involves targeting to plasmalemmal caveolae. His group identified roles for hydrogen peroxide in intracellular signalling to eNOS via oxidant-modulated phosphorylation and physiological pathways in both cardiomyocytes and vascular endothelial cells. His extremely impactful work may help identify novel pathways for neurovascular control of cardiac remodelling; on the effects of in utero oxidative stress on neonatal heart failure; on the effects of endothelial oxidative stress on hypertension, aortic aneurysm formation, and effects of neurovascular oxidative stress on the blood-brain barrier.
In his spare time, Dr. Michel enjoys playing the accordion and is the founding director of the Boston Squeezebox Ensemble, the official accordion octet of the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.
We look forward to his visit in May 2027 when he will present a lecture as part of the Maurice McGregor Cardiovascular Research Day, as well as exchange and potentially collaborate with members of the McGill community in the field of circulatory diseases.