• DOI:10.1177/1074248409343182
• Corpus ID: 44733401

A Salute to Our Founding Editor-in-Chief Bramah N. Singh, MD, DPhil, DSc, FRCP

@article{Kloner2009AST,
  title={A Salute to Our Founding Editor-in-Chief Bramah N. Singh, MD, DPhil, DSc, FRCP},
  author={Robert A. Kloner},
  journal={Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics},
  year={2009},
  volume={14},
  pages={154 - 156}
}

• R. Kloner
• Published 1 September 2009
• Medicine
• Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics

D r Bramah N. Singh, MD, DPhil, DSc, FRCP, is one of the world’s leading experts on arrhythmias and antiarrhythmic pharmacology. He has had a long and distinguished career in clinical and experimental cardiology and pharmacology spanning several continents and 5 decades. Dr Singh was born on March 3, 1938, in the Fiji Islands. He received his MD from the University of Otago in New Zealand in 1963, and his postgraduate training included a rotating internship at Auckland and Green Lane Hospitals in New Zealand, a residency in medicine/nephrology at Auckland Hospital, and a cardiology fellowship at Green Lane Hospital in Auckland. In 1969, he was awarded the Nuffield Travelling Fellowship to Oxford and was affiliated with Hertford College and the University Department of Pharmacology where he worked on antiarrhythmic agents in the laboratory of EM Vaughan Williams. This work constituted the bulk of what has become the basis of the Classification of the Antiarrhythmic Drugs and for this, Dr Singh was awarded the doctor of philosophy in 1971, from the University of Oxford. He also served as Nuffield Demonstrator in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford and as an International Postdoctoral US Public Health Service Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston from 1971 to 1972. Dr Singh returned to New Zealand in June 1972, as a senior lecturer in medicine and therapeutics at Auckland University School of Medicine and consultant cardiologist at Green Lake Hospital. During this period, he broadened his horizon of clinical pharmacology with an MD from Auckland. We are fortunate that Dr Singh then returned to the United States where from 1976 to 1980 he served as associate professor of medicine at UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles and director of inpatient cardiology and attending physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, also in Los Angeles, California. From 1988 to 1996, he served as chief of the cardiology division at the VA Medical Center of West Los Angeles. He has been a full professor of medicine at UCLA since 1980 and director of the Cardiovascular Research Laboratory at the VA Medical Center since 1978. It was shortly after 1988 that I moved to Los Angeles and had the opportunity to meet with and learn from Dr Bramah Singh. This soft-spoken academic leader is one of the founders of the field of Class III antiarrhythmic drugs. His seminal work on drugs such as amiodarone, sotalol, and, recently, dronedarone explored the basic electrophysiology of these unique agents and then applied them to the care of the cardiac patient. Dr Singh’s impact on the field of electrophysiologic pharmacology has been profound. For these contributions, Dr Singh has been bestowed the DSc by the University of Oxford and the University of Otago. Although Dr Singh is well known for his major impact on defining the pharmacologic properties of antiarrhythmic agents, he has also published extensive works in the field of cardioprotection, including studies on the effects of calcium channel blockers and b blockers on myocardial ischemia and myocardial infarction. Dr Singh has carried out numerous studies that have helped define the current pharmacologic therapy for angina pectoris and silent ischemia—including studies on calcium blockers. Dr Singh has published From the Heart Institute, Good Samaritan Hospital; and the Cardiovascular Division, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.