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2025 CMHC Annual Main banner

Paul M. Ridker, MD, MPH (he/him/his)

Director, Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Harvard Medical School
Brookline, Massachusetts, United States

Paul M Ridker – Brief Bio 2025

Dr. Paul M Ridker, MD, MPH serves as the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston Massachusetts USA.
Over a 30-year period, Dr. Ridker and his collaborators provided the first proof-of-principle for the inflammation hypothesis of atherothrombosis in humans; the first demonstration that statin therapy is both lipid-lowering and anti-inflammatory; the first FDA-approved diagnostic test for vascular inflammation (hsCRP); the first proven anti-inflammatory treatment for heart disease (canakinumab); and brought into clinical practice worldwide the concept of “residual inflammatory risk”. On multiple occasions Dr. Ridker’s work has altered clinical guidelines for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of atherosclerotic disease – the most common cause of death on a global basis. As a direct consequence of this work, multiple novel anti-inflammatory agents targeting interrelated aspects of heart disease ranging from chronic atherosclerosis to acute ischemia to congestive heart failure are under development at nearly all major pharmaceutical companies worldwide.
Dr. Ridker is additionally known for his leadership of over 15 major multi-national randomized clinical trials including PREVENT, JUPITER, SPIRE-1, SPIRE-2, CANTOS, CIRT, PROMINENT, the ongoing ATRIUM trial (addressing abatacept for immune checkpoint inhibitor myocarditis), and the ongoing ZEUS and HERMES trials (addressing IL-6 inhibition to reduce vascular event rates in the settings of chronic kidney disease and heart failure).
Continuously funded by the NIH and the recipient of multiple honorary degrees, Dr. Ridker is a Distinguished Scientist of the American Heart Association and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, USA.
Recent international awards include the Antonio Gotto Prize in Atherosclerotic Research (2022); the Hugh Sinclair Award from the British Atherosclerosis Society (2023); the Akiro Endo Award from the International Atherosclerosis Society (2024); and the Anitschkow Award from the European Atherosclerosis Society (2025).
With an h-index in 2024 of 283 and over 486,000 cumulative citations, Dr. Ridker is among the top 10 most-cited biomedical researchers in any field worldwide.

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