Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation – Population Health Research Institute
PHRI is an academic health science research institute driven by a passion to improve health outcomes for our global population. Our research is best achieved through worldwide collaboration with governments, academic colleagues, pharmaceutical, and device industries. We believe in an atmosphere that promotes asking questions, questions that lead to new studies and new discoveries, from which our efforts are best rewarded by global solutions.
The Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) was founded in 1999 as a joint Institute of Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation (HHS) and McMaster University; it is now the largest and most cited academic cardiovascular research group in Canada. Our vision is to conduct large simple studies to address questions of international importance and relevance.
PHRI has conducted more than 50 global trials and epidemiological studies in more than 1500 centres in 83 countries, involving over 500,000 patients. Our research programs explore the causes and prevention of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and societal influences on health, perioperative vascular complications, and stroke. The institute is involved in researching risk factors for heart disease and stroke in urban and rural populations, developing countries, and throughout the stages of life, with specific emphasis on variations by ethnicity and geographic region. PHRI also plays an active role in the education of individual researchers, and in building capacity internationally for the development of global research programs.
PHRI is home to more than 250 researchers, physicians, scientists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, rehabilitation experts, nutrition scientists, research coordinators, allied health professionals, and quality assurance personnel, as well as research and administrative support personnel. PHRI also has highly-experienced operational support teams in information and communication technologies, financial and contract services, and human resources.
Lead investigators –
Salim Yusuf, D.Phil, FRCPC is a Professor of Medicine at McMaster University, Director of the
Population Health Research Institute, and is Vice-President of Research and Chief Scientific Officer at
Hamilton Health Sciences. He holds a Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario Research Chair, was a
Senior Scientist of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and has received several international
awards and recognitions, and was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2005. He has led
several major trials and epidemiologic studies that have changed medical practice. He has published
over 450 articles, and his research collaboration involves 66 countries in all the inhabited continents
of the world.
Dr. Clara Chow (Post-doctoral research fellow) with experience in cardiovascular epidemiology and
prevention in low-income communities has joined the PHRI to work to develop rapid appraisal
methods that are internationally applicable to measure community-level indicators of health. These
methods will be used to profile the overall health of communities in low- middle and high-income
countries and validated against individual measures of risk factors and disease in the PURE
(Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiological Study) a large-scale cardiovascular cohort study of
135,000 individuals across 18 countries.
Team Leader
Dr. Phil. Salim Yusuf
(E-Mail)
Dr. Clara Chow
(E-Mail)
