Robert M. Graham (cardiologist)
Robert Michael Graham AO, FAA, FAHMS (born 1948) is an Australian-born clinician-scientist. He is the Des Renford Professor of Medicine at University of New South Wales and the Head of the Molecular Cardiology and Biophysics Division at Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. Education. Robert Graham received his medical training, MBBS with Honours, and his MD degree from the University of New South Wales. He then trained as a physician in internal medicine and cardiorenal disease in Australia and the US, leading to Fellowships of the Royal Australian College of Physicians and the American College  of Physicians. In the US he received postdoctoral training in pharmacology (Alfred G. Gilman, Chairman and Nobel Laureate) and medicine (Don Seldin, Chairman) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. Graham was then appointed as an Assistant Professor in Pharmacology and Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. Career. In 1982, Graham moved to the Massachusetts General Hospital (Cellular and Molecular Research Laboratory, Edgar Haber, Chairman) and Harvard Medical School, Boston as an Associate Professor of Medicine. During his time in Boston, he did a sabbatical in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate H. Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts  Institute of Technology. In 1989, he moved to the Cleveland Clinic Foundation as the Robert C. Tarazi Chairman of the Molecular Cardiology Department, and Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio. Graham returned to Australia in 1994 as the inaugural Executive Director at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. He held the position until stepping down in March 2020. Research. Graham's research is reported in over 290 peer-reviewed papers and cited over 26,000 times. For many years his research has focused on molecular cardiology, with emphasis on circulatory control mechanisms , receptor signalling, hypertension and cardiac hypertrophy. Together with Charles Homcy, his work contributed to understanding receptor structure, function and signalling. This work subsequently led to the discovery that a protein crosslinking enzyme also functions as a unique multifunctional protein involved in receptor signalling. More recently, together with colleagues, Ahsan Husain and Siiri Iismaa, Graham has been actively involved in studies of cardiac regeneration and the application of stem cells for the treatment of heart diseases, and with A/Prof Eleni Giannoulatou, the pathophysiology and genetics of spontaneous coronary artery dissection. In 2021, with Glenn King and Nathan Palpant, he co -founded Infensa Bioscience, an Australian biotechnology company. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Lowy Medical Research Institute in California; and Impedimed, a Brisbane-based medical device company.