Dr. Ridker serves as the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, a population biology research unit at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital focused primarily on translating the biology of innate immunity and vascular inflammation into clinical practice. Best known for his pioneering work on inflammatory biomarkers such as high-sensitivity CRP and interleukin-6, the first demonstrations of the anti-inflammatory effects of statins, the guideline changing JUPITER trial in 2008, and ultimately through the CANTOS interleukin-1beta inhibition trial in 2017, Dr. Ridker's work has led to a fundamental shift in our understanding of atherosclerosis and to the first proof-of-principle that targeted anti-cytokine therapies can lower cardiovascular event rates in the absence of lipid lowering. Insights from his group that the magnitude of inflammation inhibition directly relates to the magnitude of clinical benefit has spawned a novel class of cardiovascular therapeutics, led to the clinical recognition that "residual inflammatory risk" is a separate and distinct entity from "residual cholesterol risk", and opened a novel approach to the treatment of inflammatory lung cancers.

Dr. Ridker has served as Trial Chairman of the PREVENT, PRINCE, Val-MARC, LANCET, JUPITER, SPIRE-1, SPRE-2, CANTOS, CIRT, and PROMINENT trials and served on multiple federal scientific review panels including a 10-year term on the NHLBI Board of External Experts. Dr. Ridker has received multiple research awards and honorary degrees including an AHA Clinician Scientist Award (1992-1997), an AHA Established Investigator Award (1997-2002), the Doris Duke Distinguished Scientist Award (2000), selection to the “TIME 100 Most Influential”(2004), the Alumni Award of Merit Harvard School of Public Health (2005), the NIH Director’s Astute Clinician Award (2005), and an AHA Distinguished Scientist Award (2013).

Recent major invited lectures delivered by Dr. Ridker include the Distinguished Scientist Lecture of the American Heart Association (2018); the Oates Honorary Lectureship (2018), the Distinguished Lecture at the ATVB meetings (2018), the Maseri Lecture at the Italian ATBV meetings (2019), the Keynote Lecture of the European Atherosclerosis Society (2019), and the Braunwald Lecture of the American College of Cardiology (2019).