Ashkan Shoamanesh
Associate Professor, Medicine

Dr. Shoamanesh is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Neurology) at McMaster University, where he holds the Marta and Owen Boris Chair in Stroke Research and Care, and the founding Director of the Hemorrhagic Stroke Research Program and a Scientist at the affiliated Population Health Research Institute. He is a Stroke Neurologist who obtained his M.D. from McMaster University (2007), prior to pursuing Neurology residency training at the University of British Columbia (2012). This was followed by fellowship training at the Boston University School of Medicine/Framingham Heart Study (2012-13) and Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2013-14).

His clinical trials program is working on establishing new treatments and standards of care that prevent stroke and reduce stroke-related disability. He leads several national and international multicentre randomized trials as PI/Co-PI, including the global main phase ENRICH-AF trial (NCT03950076) investigating optimal stroke prevention in intracranial hemorrhage survivors with atrial fibrillation and the phase 3 OCEANIC-STROKE trial (NCT05686070) investigating the novel direct factor XIa inhibitor (asundexian) for stroke prevention in patients with acute non-cardioembolic ischemic stroke/TIA. He is the founding chair of the Canadian HEmorrhagic Stroke trIals InitiatiVE (CoHESIVE; www2.phri.ca/cohesive/) and is lead author of the inaugural Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations on the Management of Spontaneous Intracerebral Hemorrhage. He additionally serves on the leadership teams of several public and industry funded randomized trials in the fields of cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Shoamanesh has published a large number of manuscripts in leading scientific journals and serves on the editorial boards of Stroke, International Journal of Stroke and Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences. His research program is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, National Institutes of Health, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Brain Canada, Canadian Stroke Prevention Intervention Network and Canadian Stroke Consortium, in addition to multiple industry partners. His contributions to stroke research and leadership in the field have been recognized by several prominent international organizations, such as the European Stroke Conference (2014 Young Investigator Award), American Heart/Stroke Association (2015 Globus, 2019 Siekert and 2019 Dudley White Awards), Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (2019 Barnett Scholarship), American Academy of Neurology (2020 Pessin Prize), and World Stroke Organization (2020 Future Stroke Leaders Program).