Salim Yusuf OC FRSC (born 26 November 1952) is an Indian-born Canadian physician, the Marion W. Burke Chair in Cardiovascular Disease at McMaster University Medical School. He is a cardiologist and epidemiologist, and is well known for his cardiology-related clinical trial research. He also formerly served as president of the World Heart Federation. Yusuf has criticized the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and disputes the scientific consensus on dietary sodium and saturated fat intake.

Salim Yusuf was born in 1952 in a middle class family in the town of Kottarakkara in Kerala, India, and was educated at schools in Kottarakkara, as well as Mumbai and Kochi. Yusuf stated that his father compelled him to get into medicine. Following a number of failed attempts, Yusuf studied medicine at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore. Yusuf recounted that he “was very aware that I was not the brightest student”, and that he "just had to work as hard as possible to keep up with my peers". Yusuf later earned a DPhil at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. Yusuf has stated that he became interested in cardiology "partly because it was such a logical specialty and partly because it was a field in which we thought we could do much to help patients". Despite admitting that prior to studying at Oxford that he had "very little direct interest in research", at Oxford he took part in research into cardiovascular disease.

His doctoral thesis was titled "Beta adrenergic blockade in myocardial infarction" and his supervisor was Peter Sleight.

In 1984, Yusuf moved to the National Institutes of Health in the United States, where he led clinical trials that showed the value of ACE inhibitors in people with left ventricular dysfunction and the optimal use of digoxin). He came to the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in 1992 as director of the cardiology division. In 1999 McMaster created the Population Health Research Institute at the Hamilton Health Sciences campus of McMaster, and made Yusuf the director of the center and vice president of research at HHS.

From 1999 to 2004, he also held an appointment as a senior scientist at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

One of Yusuf's most cited research studies is the INTERHEART study published in The Lancet in 2004, a case-control study regarding the risk factors of myocardial infarction (commonly known as heart attacks) with participants in 52 countries.

In 2011, he was the world's second-most-cited cardiology researcher, and in 2020, he was the world's most-cited cardiology researcher. Yusuf's large-scale clinical trials have had a significant impact on the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. in particular, he has demonstrated the value of combinations of blood pressure lowering and lipid lowering with statins and of combinations of antiplatelet therapy and joint use of anticoagulants and aspirin in low doses to prevent cardiovascular disease and death.

He was a past president of the World Heart Federation 2015–2016, where he initiated the Emerging Leaders Program which is now named after him.