Stevo Julius, MD, ScD

Born: 1929

Julius, a native of Croatia, is a pioneer in hypertension research, concerned with mechanisms, complications, and therapy. He and received his MD from the University of Zagreb in 1953. Joining the Department of Medicine at the University of Michigan in 1961, he has worked his entire career, heading its hypertension division for 25 years.

His research contributions are characterized by a wide curiosity and ability to utilize the study method appropriate to the stage of knowledge and the question, whether mechanisms in animals and man, predictors and causes in populations and individuals, or therapy in mass trials. He has over the years addressed major questions about the relation of sympathetic activity and heart rate to hypertension and its complications, the inter-relations of obesity, insulin resistance, and hypertension, of cardiac output and peripheral resistance to borderline hypertension, and the results of and creation of ventricular hypertrophy. His studies among populations, including the Tecumseh Study, have addressed prediction of complications and the potential for preventing high blood pressure in the first place. He has led or participated in the more innovative therapeutic trials including the VALUE and the LIFE trials and ALLHAT.

Professor Julius has trained two generations of teachers and researchers and remains active in the Metabolic Syndrome Institute in Ann Arbor. He has led the International Society of Hypertension and other clinical societies.

Julius also has written a remarkable memoir of a youth growing up and surviving during wartime in the former Yugoslavia, entitled: “Neither Red nor Dead.” (HB)