Professor Alex Pitman

During my career, I have been the Departmental Director of several departments, including the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and St Vincent’s Melbourne. I was also a partner at Lake Imaging in Ballarat and Geelong before starting Australia’s first regional PET-CT oncologic service at St John of God Hospital in Ballarat.

Since 2018, I have been the Director of Imaging at Northern Beaches Medical Imaging.

On the academic side of my career, I have been a Professorial Fellow in the Anatomy and Radiology Departments at the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor in Medical Imaging at the University of Notre Dame.

I am currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney.

Anatomy is my first and greatest academic passion, and radiology is the most anatomically focused medical specialty. It shares the anatomical depth of surgery but, unlike individual surgical subspecialties, it covers the entire body from head to toe.

I enjoy PET and nuclear medicine because they display macroscopic physiology across almost every system in the body. While many other physiological specialties exist, such as respiratory medicine, cardiology, exercise physiology and intensive care—only PET and nuclear medicine encompass the physiology of the entire human body.