SH

S Harikrishnan

Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, SCTIMST

ORCID iD 0000-0002-7509-0712
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BIOGRAPHY — Harikrishnan S
Harikrishnan S (Sivadasanpillai Harikrishnan) is Senior Professor of Cardiology at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), Thiruvananthapuram, India, where he headed the department from 2023 to 2026. He graduated in medicine from Medical College, Trivandrum (1991), completed an MD in internal medicine at Medical College Hospital, Calicut (1995), and a DM in cardiology at SCTIMST (1998). He held a Commonwealth Fellowship in interventional cardiology at the University of Leeds, UK (2005–06), and completed the PH-LEADER public health leadership programme at Emory University, USA (2014).
He is a clinical researcher and an interventional cardiologist, with a clinical interest in coronary and valvular intervention and a research focus on heart failure. He is the author of a monograph with accompanying tutorial videos on balloon mitral valvotomy, widely used by cardiology trainees and fellows.
He established the first heart failure registry in India — the Trivandrum Heart Failure Registry — and followed the cohort for more than ten years, producing one of the few long-term longitudinal datasets on heart failure from the region. He went on to coordinate the ICMR-funded National Heart Failure Registry, which enrolled 10,850 patients across all states and regions of India; the one-year outcomes were published in Nature Communications in 2025. He also co-led the Kerala Heart Failure Registry. Together these studies established that patients with heart failure in India present around a decade younger than Western cohorts, receive suboptimal guideline-directed therapy, and experience high short- and long-term mortality.
In 2019 he was awarded one of ten ICMR National Centres for Advanced Research and Excellence (CARE) in heart failure, funded at ₹50 million. Under this programme he established the first heart failure biobank in India, now holding more than 4,000 biological samples including cardiac tissue, and led the team that developed the India-specific Heart Failure Quality of Life questionnaire. His centre is recognised as an ICMR Collaborating Centre of Excellence (CCoE) for heart failure research (2023–2028). In 2026 ICMR awarded him a Centre for Advanced Research (CAR) in heart failure, funded at ₹100 million, to strengthen heart failure care within primary care in the Kerala health system.
He works as clinical investigator with the biomedical technology wing of SCTIMST on medical device development. His team developed the Chitra Core coronary stent, released commercially in 2026, and co-developed the Chitra TiN titanium nitride-coated stent, currently undergoing preclinical evaluation in Germany. Other projects include a point-of-care device for measuring NT-proBNP, a heart failure biomarker, and two ventricular assist devices: a paracorporeal left ventricular assist device and a percutaneous catheter-based left ventricular assist device. He is the principal clinical investigator at the DBT Centre of Excellence for Minimally Invasive Cardiovascular Devices and also at the ICMR Centre for Advanced Research on Preclinical Evaluation of Medical Devices at SCTIMST. He is a co-inventor on six patent applications and holds a registered design.
He was included in the Stanford University–Elsevier list of the top 2% of scientists worldwide in 2024. He received the ICMR Amrut Mody Unichem Prize for outstanding clinical research (2020), the Dr P. A. Alexander Oration Award of IMA AMS Kerala (2023), and the inaugural M. S. Valiathan Award for Outstanding Research Investigator from SCTIMST (2022).
He has edited three books, is founding editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Pulmonary Circulation, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Heart Failure Journal (Wolters Kluwer). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences (India), the American College of Cardiology, the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians, London.

Employment

  • Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology Professor (Senior Grade)
    2023 - Present
  • SCTIMST Professor
    2012 - 2023

Education

  • Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology DM
    1996 - 1998

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (226)