Our Colleagues Remembered
In memory of great scientists who partnered with PHRI
PHRI is honoured to have collaborated with these scientists and clinicians who left big shoes to fill in their respective fields. Learn more about these late, great friends and fellow researchers.
Stuart Connolly is a Professor of Medicine at McMaster University and a cardiac electrophysiologist at Hamilton Health Sciences. He became a faculty member at McMaster University in 1983 and was awarded a full professorship in 1994. He was also appointed as the inaugural holder of the Salim Yusuf Chair in Cardiology at McMaster University.
He has published more than 270 scientific articles in the field, and is currently a member of the editorial boards for a number of prominent cardiology journals, including Heart, the American Heart Journal and the Journal of Pacing and Electrophysiology. His main research interests are focused on the evaluation of treatments for heart rhythm disorders. His academic career has been largely devoted to the design and execution of controlled clinical trials in this area.
He holds a Masters degree from Fordham University, New York, and an MD from McGill University in Montreal. He received his specialist training in cardiology at the University of Toronto and at Stanford University.
JANICE POGUE was an exceptional statistician who created the statistical group at the Population Health Research Institute where she worked for 22 years, and as a faculty member at McMaster University’s then named Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Her untimely death in 2016 was a major loss for PHRI, McMaster University, and the international biostatistics/clinical trials research community. The annual Janice Pogue Lectureship in Biostatistics was launched in 2017 to honour her legacy.
YANNICK LE MANACH was an Investigator in the Perioperative and Surgery research program at PHRI, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesia and the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact, at McMaster University. He passed in July 2020.
His main clinical research interests included the prediction of postoperative complications after surgery, and perioperative hemodynamic management care and strategies to improve outcomes after surgery. With an MD in anesthesia and critical care from Paris VI University, a Masters of Cardiac Physiology from Paris VII University, and a PhD in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Paris V University in France, he published more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
HEATHER ARTHUR was a pioneer in cardiac rehabilitation research in Canada, Professor Emeritus at McMaster’s School of Nursing, and the first woman and first nursing professional to be awarded the Canadian Association of Cardiac Rehabilitation Terry Kavanagh Prize in 2013, the year she retired. The Heather M. Arthur Population Health Research Institute/Hamilton Health Sciences Chair in Inter-Professional Health Research in the McMaster School of Nursing was created in 2019 in her honour, two years after her death.
KHALID YUSOFF, cardiologist, leader at three of Malaysia’s leading universities, and champion of excellence in medical research, worked with Salim Yusuf and the PHRI’s Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Khalid Yusoff recruited almost 12,000 participants in four of Malaysia’s states into PURE. He passed away in April 2021.
He was Dean, medical faculty, at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) where he established the first clinical electrophysiology laboratory in Malaysia; foundation dean of the medical faculty at the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). where his initiatives included an Institute for Medical Molecular Biology and a Centre for Translational Research and Epidemiology; and Vice-Chancellor and President of UCSI University. He was named a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow; he was trained in the UK as a cardiologist.
PETER SLEIGHT was Honorary Consultant at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, following a long and successful research career, in particular in the area of heart attacks. He was the Field-Marshal Alexander Professor of Cardiology at Oxford University (1973-1994) and a renowned champion and influencer in global research collaboration and innovation.
He was a mentor of PHRI Executive Director Salim Yusuf, who worked alongside Professor Sleight, with Rory Collins and Richard Peto, during the late 1970s and ’80s on the International Study of Infarct Survival (ISIS) series of trials.
Officially retired in 1994, Dr. Sleight continued to be involved in many trials, including PHRI’s HOPE, ONTARGET, ORIGIN, OASIS-5 and RE-LY studies, among others. He passed away at the age of 91 on October 7th, 2020.
BONGANI MAYOSI was the world’s foremost authority on interventions for tuberculous pericarditis, who worked with PHRI’s Salim Yusuf in creation of the Pan-African Investigation of the Management of Pericarditis, a multi-center research consortium. Dr. Mayosi’s relationship with PHRI also led to the establishment of the Global Rheumatic Heart Disease Registry (REMEDY), which became the first multi-country registry and cohort study of 3,000 people with RHD across much of Africa, the Middle East, and east Asia.
As well as being appointed Dean, Faculty of Medicine, University of Cape Town, Dr. Mayosi received the Honorary Fellowship of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and became one of the few Africans inducted to the National Academy of Medicine in the US. He passed away in July 2018.
KLAS MALMBERG, cardiologist renowned for his work in academia as well as the pharmaceutical industry, did a two-year sabbatical at PHRI (1997-1999) where he worked closely with Drs. Gerstein, Bosch and Yusuf on diabetes and cardiovascular research. Dr. Malmberg was a professor of cardiology at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, where he pioneered research on the relationship between diabetes and heart disease, in particular heart attacks. Wanting to develop new medications based on some of his research work, Dr. Malmberg had a number of senior positions at various pharmaceutical companies, including Global Medical Science Director at AstraZeneca, and Global Clinical Leader for a major diabetes project at Roche. He passed away in 2018.
