Professor Christos Pantelis
Professor Christos Pantelis, MB BS, MD, MRCPsych (UK), FRANZCP
Professor of Neuropsychiatry, The University of Melbourne
Scientific Director, Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre
FULL PROFILE
SUMMARY PROFILE
Professor Christos Pantelis is Foundation Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Scientific Director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at The University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health. He heads a team of researchers that have been undertaking neuroimaging and neuropsychological work on schizophrenia and psychosis since 1993 in Australia. In that time he has established an internationally unique database of over 2,000 MRI brain scans in patients with schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
A University of Melbourne graduate, Professor Pantelis undertook psychiatric and research training in London. He won Travelling Fellowships from the UK and undertook imaging research at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington in 1992. After returning to Australia in 1992 he established a research unit at the Mental Health Research Institute. He was subsequently appointed to Associate Professor with The University of Melbourne and established an active research and clinical facility (Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Research & Academic Unit) at Sunshine Hospital in 2000. His neurobiological work in schizophrenia formed the basis of his doctoral (MD) thesis, which was awarded in 2004.
Professor Pantelis was appointed to the Foundation Chair in Neuropsychiatry in 2004 and has established the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre. He has received 11 NHMRC project grants since 1994 and is co-chief investigator of a successful $7.4 million NHMRC Program Grant that commenced in 2005, which focuses on the neurobiology of emerging severe mental illness (esp. schizophrenia and affective disorders) during late brain development. He has published almost 180 papers and chapters, including papers in high-profile international psychiatry, neurology, radiology and medical journals. He has also published one of the first books on the neuropsychology of schizophrenia. He is currently co-editing two further books, on olfaction and on the neuropsychology of mental disorders. He has won a number of national and international awards, most recently being awarded the Selwyn-Smith Medical Research Prize of The University of Melbourne. He has honorary positions in the Centre for Neuroscience and Howard Florey Institute. Professor Pantelis is a member of various national and international advisory boards and committees on early psychosis, cognition in psychosis, neuroimaging in psychiatry, and drug treatments in schizophrenia and on the editorial boards of a number of journals.