25th Annual PET CT meeting

Rod is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne and at Monash University. He was the inaugural Director of Cancer Imaging at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and is an internationally-recognized pioneer in oncological PET and therapeutic nuclear medicine with more than 30-years’ experience in both. He has recently founded a company to perform research and development into the emerging field of theranostics and has installed an ultraextended-field-of-view PET/CT scanner at the Melbourne Theranostic Innovation Centre (MTIC) in Melbourne.

He was inducted as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science in 2015 and was the recipient of the 2019 International Cancer Imaging Society Gold Medal for contributions to oncological imaging and 2021 Peter E. Valk Memorial Award of the Society of Nuclear Medicine for lifetime achievements
in clinical PET. In 2023, he received the Saul Hertz Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine for his contribution to the field of theranostics. He was also awarded an Order of Australia Membership (AM) in the General Division in the King’s Birthday Honours of 2023.

He has published over 700 peer-reviewed manuscripts including contributions in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Lancet, Lancet Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, Nature Communications, and the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. His H-index is over 100 with over 43,000 lifetime citations (Google Scholar).

Professor Hicks ran the Translational Research Laboratory and Pre-Clinical Imaging Facility at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre from 2002-2021 and has a strong research interest in the linking of genotype with molecular imaging phenotype and personalized selection and delivery of radionuclide therapy, including combinatorial therapies. He has been actively involved in developing and clinically implementing novel radiopharmaceuticals for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Professor Michelle Williams is a Professor of Cardiovascular Imaging at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Consultant Radiologist at NHS Lothian. She is Associate Director of the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre and the Imaging theme lead. Her research centres around multi-modality non-invasive imaging of the heart and blood vessels, including using machine learning and other advanced analytic techniques. She is president of the British Society of Cardiovascular Imaging, member of the executive community of the European Society of Cardiovascular Radiology, and member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography. 

John O’Brien is Professor of Old Age Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. He is a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Emeritus Senior Investigator and an elected Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. From 2014 to 2024 he was the NIHR Clinical Research Network National Lead for Dementia.

His main research interests are in the clinical and research application of imaging biomarkers to different types of dementia. He has been a member several Guideline groups including the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the British Association of Psychopharmacology, the European Federation of Neurological Sciences and the European Stroke Association.

Professor Tara Barwick is a dual accredited Consultant in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust London and Professor of Practice (Cancer Imaging) at Imperial College London.   

She led on the prostate cancer section of the joint BNMS/RCP UK PET guidelines.  

Although primarily clinically based, she is active in research with over 100 peer reviewed publications.  

She is currently a co-CI along with Martin Connor of the 1.9M PSMA PET ‘Avidity’ study.

Gary Cook trained in radiology and then nuclear medicine in London. In 2011 he returned to King’s College London and Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals as a clinical academic and a nuclear medicine physician in the King’s College London and Guy’s & St Thomas’ PET Centre. The department has 2 long axial field of view PET/CT scanners as well as short axial FOV and PET/MRI scanners. His research interests include imaging bone metastases, measuring tumour heterogeneity, evaluation of novel tracers and biomarkers and refining multimodality imaging for diagnosis and response assessment in oncology.