Ashkan Shoamanesh

Professor, Medicine

0000-0002-2802-1626

Dr. Ashkan Shoamanesh is a Professor of Medicine (Division of Neurology) and a stroke neurologist at McMaster University. He is the founding Director of the Hemorrhagic Stroke Research Program and a Senior Scientist at the Population Health Research Institute. He obtained his medical doctorate from McMaster University (2007), and completed neurology residency training at the University of British Columbia (2012) and clinical/research fellowship training in vascular neurology at Boston University/Framingham Heart Study (2013) and Harvard Medical School (2014).

Shoamanesh’s clinical trials program focuses on advancing treatments and establishing new standards of care to prevent stroke or reduce stroke-related death and disability. He is the principal investigator (PI) or Co-PI of multiple global multicentre randomized trials, including ENRICH-AF (NCT03950076; Lancet 2023), OCEANIC-STROKE (NEJM 2026), INTERCEPT (NCT05723926), SATURN-MRI (NCT03936361), CoVasc-ICH 2 (NCT06587737), DO-IT (NCT06571149), and LEAST. He has also held central leadership roles in the ANNEXa-I (NEJM 2024), PACIFIC-STROKE (Lancet 2022), and NAVIGATE-ESUS (NEJM 2018) trials. Shoamanesh is the founding Chair of the Canadian Hemorrhagic Stroke Trials Initiative (CoHESIVE), and was the lead author of the first Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations on the Management of Spontaneous Intracerebral Hemorrhage.

Shoamanesh has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts in top-tier scientific journals. He is a founding Associate Editor of BMJ Stroke and serves on the editorial boards of Stroke, the International Journal of Stroke, and the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences. He is an active contributor to international scientific meetings and previously co-chaired the World Stroke Congress (World Stroke Organization) and the World Intracranial Hemorrhage Conference.

His research program receives funding from several bodies, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, National Institutes of Health, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Brain Canada, Canadian Stroke Consortium, Population Health Research Institute, the Australian Government Medical Research Future Fund, and various industry partners. His contributions have been recognized through numerous prestigious honors from leading Canadian and international organizations, including the American Academy of Neurology (Pessin Award); American Heart/Stroke Association (Globus Award, Siekert Award, Dudley White Award); American Neurological Association (Denny-Brown Award); European Stroke Organization (Young Investigator Award, Scientific Excellence Award); Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (National New Investigator Award, Barnett Scholarship); McMaster University (Department of Medicine Mid-Career Research Award); and the World Stroke Organization (Future Leaders Program).