John Ingram Pitt (13 March 1937 – 23 March 2022) was an Australian mycologist, known as a leading expert on the role of fungi in food spoilage. He gained an international reputation as a pioneering researcher on the ecology of spoilage molds in extreme environments.
Education and career John Ingram Pitt was born and grew up on a small farm near Wamberal, New South Wales. After attending Gosford High School, he moved to Sydney. In 1954, he became an employee of the Australian Government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He began at CSIRO as a Technical Assistant Grade 1 (Junior), and was appointed a Chief Research Scientist in 1992 at the age of 55. At the time of his death in 2022, he was the only CSIRO employee in its history to start at the lowest research employment grade and to go through all of the research grades up to the highest level. He retired from CSIRO in 2002. After joining CSIRO in 1954, he became a part-time student at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he studied food technology. At UNSW he completed a seven-year course of study in eight years, followed by an M.Sc. qualifying course, and then a part-time M.Sc. program. His 1965 M.Sc. thesis is entitled Microbiological Problems in Prune Preservation. On leave of absence from CSIRO, he became in 1965 a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. He graduated there with a Ph.D. in 1968. His Ph.D. thesis (on the taxonomy of Metschnikowia) is entitled "The yeast genus Metschnikowia". His thesis advisor was Martin Wesley Miller (1925–2005) in the UC Davis department of food science and technology. After completing his Ph.D., Pitt spent a postdoctoral year at the USDA's Northern Regional Research Laboratory (NRRL), where his supervisor was Clifford William Hesseltine (1917–1999). At the USDA Pitt studied Penicillium taxonomy and mycotoxin occurrences in food chains. When his postdoctoral fellowship ended, he returned to CSIRO and collaborated with John H. B. Christian. Michael Vincent Tracey, who was the Chief of the CSIRO Division of Food Research from 1967 to 1978, asked Pitt to systematically monitor the mycotoxins threatening food safety. Pitt used many fungal cultures obtained from NRRL during his postdoctoral fellowship to establish a yeast and mold collection at CSIRO, which by the year 2021 had about 6000 specimens. The fungal collection is officially known as the FRR culture collection and is of major importance in food and industrial applications. The FRR culture collection includes Penicillium and Aspergillus species and their related teleomorphs. The collection also contains xerophilic fungi. The collection is the basis for Pitt's book The Genus Penicillium and its teleomorphic States Eupenicillium and Talaromyces (Academic Press, 1980) and the book Fungi and Food Spoilage (Academic Press, 1985), coauthored by Ailsa Diane Hocking. The book extensively describes fungal species that cause spoilage of fruits and vegetables. From the 1970s to 1990s, Pitt and Hocking did pioneer research on methods for isolating and identifying foodborne fungi, as well as their physiology and ecology. The main focus of the research was on xerophilic fungi. Pitt and Hocking did research for the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) on the fungi and mycotoxins that occur in food commodities from Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Pitt became a leading authority on mycotoxins. In the 1980s he investigated the role of the environment in problems with aflatoxin in peanuts grown in Australia. He pioneered biocontrol by competitive exclusion (replacing toxigenic fungal strains by non-toxigenic fungal strains) to control aflatoxin formation in peanuts and maize. In 1986, Pitt and three collaborators discovered the species Aspergillus pisci (first named Polypaecilum pisce).
Publications Pitt was the author or coauthor of many papers related to the ecology of molds that cause food spoilage. He, with his frequent collaborator Ailsa D. Hocking, researched ways to prevent food spoilage caused by the fungal genera Aspergillus, Penicillium, and Cladosporium, along with the yeast species Zygosaccharomyces bailii Pitt was the author, coauthor, editor, or co-editor of 20 books and the author or coauthor of about 250 research papers or book chapters. In 2019 Pitt's Google Scholar h-index exceeded 60.
Awards Pitt was honored with three Honorary Life Memberships: from the Australian Society for Microbiology in 2000, from the Mycological Society of America in 2001, and from the British Mycological Society in 2003. He won several awards, most notably the Commonwealth of Australia's Centenary Medal with citation for "services to food science and technology".
Selected publications
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