Biography

Eugene Braunwald, M.D. is the Distinguished Hersey Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Chairman of the TIMI Study Group at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He served as the first Chief of the Cardiology Branch and as Clinical Director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, founding Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. From 1972 to 1996 he was Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and was a founding trustee and Chief Academic Officer of Partners HealthCare System.

Dr. Braunwald’s first major paper was published in Circulation Research in July 1954. 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. For the past 20 years, as Chairman of the TIMI Study Group, he and his colleagues demonstrated improved patient survival with a patent coronary artery which led to the widely accepted “open artery hypotheses.” Dr. Braunwald is an editor of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, and the founding editor of Heart Disease, now in its 7th Edition, the most influential textbooks in their fields. He has received the Distinguished Scientist Award 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 thirteen 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.” Dr. Braunwald is the only cardiologist who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

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