Rod Hicks Asia Pacific Neuroendocrine Tumour Society 2018

Rod Hicks

Rod is a Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Director of the Centre for Molecular Imaging and Therapeutic Nuclear Medicine at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia. Peter Mac installed the first PET/CT outside Europe and North America in 2001. The PET facility, founded by him in 1996, now has 4 PET/CT devices and performs over 9,000 scans per year. He has pioneered the use of PET and PET/CT in the assessment of cancer and has introduced a number of novel PET tracers. His group established the first pre-clinical PET imaging facility in Australia in 2002 and has a strong focus on translational research, genomics of rare cancers, and drug development. He is actively involved in the therapeutic nuclear medicine, especially for the treatment of neuroendocrine tumours, having first established peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) in Australia in 1996. The Neuroendocrine Service, of which he is Co-Chair, was recently certified as a European Neuroendocrine Tumour Society Centre of Excellence, the first to be granted beyond Europe. His group has been active in the clinical development of prostate cancer theranostics. He has published over 450 peer-reviewed articles and more than 20 book chapters. He holds numerous national and international research grants and is Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Imaging and International Associate Editor of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine as well as serving on 6 other editorial boards including Endocrine-Related Cancer. He received a prestigious National Health and Medical Research Council Program Grant in 2013 and NHMRC Practitioner Fellowship in 2015. He was also inducted as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science in 2015. He has previously been the Convener of the Theranostics World Congress in 2016 and the Asia-Pacific Neuroendocrine Society Meeting in 2018 and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of ENETS and as an Honorary Director of the Unicorn Foundation, which supports patients with neuroendocrine neoplasia through advocacy and research funding. He is the recipient of the 2019 International Cancer Imaging Society Gold Medal.