The – delayed due to the pandemic – recipient of the 2021 Louis and Artur Lucian Award is Vasan S. Ramachandran, MD FACC FAHA, from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas. The award, established through a bequest to McGill University by the late Olga Leibovici to honour her two brothers, was designed to recognize outstanding research in the field of circulatory diseases by a scientific investigator or group of investigators whose contribution to knowledge in this field was deemed worthy of special recognition. The Lucian Award has been bestowed annually since 1978.
“The Lucian Award from McGill University, made possible due to the generosity of the Lucian Family, is one of the most prestigious academic awards worldwide for research in cardiovascular disease,” notes George Thanassoulis, MD, a cardiologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill and a member of the award’s selection Committee. This year, the Committee selected Dr. Ramachandran, the Founding Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Texas – San Antonio, who is a leading cardiovascular epidemiologist and the former Principal Investigator of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). He is currently the Principal Investigator of the Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal (RURAL) Study (one of the youngest cohort studies in the United States).
“Dr. Ramachandran received the award in recognition of his major contributions to the molecular epidemiology of hypertension, heart failure and preventive cardiology,” shares Dr. Thanassoulis. “His work has been instrumental in the identification of novel pathways, biomarkers and genomic determinants in several domains of cardiovascular medicine and has sparked the integration of biomarkers into clinical prediction models and contributed to the development of new methods for the assessment of new prediction models.”
Recipients of the award receive both a $75,000 monetary prize and an invitation to spend one to two weeks at McGill, to give a formal Lucian Lecture, to have exchanges with members of the McGill community and to foster research collaborations with McGill investigators in the field of circulatory diseases.
Dr. Ramachandran received his medical training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India and completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard University and then at Boston University with the Framingham Heart Study. He served on the faculty at Boston University from 1998 until his move to Texas and was the Chief of the Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology Section, Department of Medicine at Boston University from 2009-2022, prior to his move to Texas. He was the Principal Investigator for the Framingham Heart Study from 2014-2022 and also directed the FHS echocardiography-vascular imaging laboratory. He was Associate Editor for Circulation, the flagship journal of the American Heart Association, from 2002-2016, and was the founding editor-in-chief of its daughter journal, Circulation Cardiovascular Genetics from 2008-2018. Dr. Ramachandran is also an outstanding mentor and teacher having trained numerous clinical and research fellows who have taken major leadership positions around the world.
The Lucian Committee would like to congratulate Dr. Ramachadran for his selection for this prestigious award on behalf of the entire McGill community. Though it was delayed because of COVID, we are now in great anticipation of his visit to our University from March 20-24, 2023. On March 23, he will deliver the Lucian Lecture during Cardiology Grand Rounds .
For more information on the Louis and Artur Lucian Award, visit: https://www.mcgill.ca/lucianaward/