Roderic Ivan Pettigrew is an American physicist, engineer, and physician who is the former Executive Dean for EnMed at Texas A&M University. From 2002-November 2017, he was the founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a pioneer and world expert in cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Early life and education Pettigrew was born in Georgia, the second of three children. He spent his pre-college years in Albany, Georgia in the 1960s, during the peak of the civil rights movement. His primary education was in a segregated school system, during the period that overlapped with passage and enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Following 11th grade and without graduating from high school, Pettigrew accepted an early admission scholarship from Charles E. Merrill, Jr., to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. While majoring in physics he also studied philosophy, art, and German at the Institute of European Studies for a year in Vienna, Austria, through a second Merrill scholarship. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Morehouse in 1972. Pettigrew then attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) which had begun a new program in medical physics, and in 1973 he received a Master of Science degree in nuclear science and engineering. He subsequently pursued a unique research program in applying nuclear engineering to medical problems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which culminated in 1977 with a Ph.D. in applied radiation physics from the Department of Nuclear Engineering. There he was a Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Whitaker Fellow, where he helped research the application of boron-neutron capture therapy for malignant brain tumors. In 1979, Pettigrew received his M.D. from the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami in a then-novel program which only admitted students who already held a Ph.D. in a science field. This accelerated program over 24 consecutive months aimed to train physician-scientists who would bring new perspectives to meeting healthcare challenges. Pettigrew completed a medical internship and residency in internal medicine at Emory University Affiliated Hospitals and in 1983 completed a residency in nuclear medicine at the University of California San Diego. There he began work on single-photon emission computed tomography and non-invasive cardiac imaging.
Research career In 1983, Pettigrew undertook a position as clinical research scientist at Picker International, Inc., where he began work in developing nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, later called MRI, specifically for the heart. Picker was the first company to manufacture an MRI scanner, and Pettigrew helped develop their technology for cardiovascular imaging. Of the first 10 Picker MRI scanners installed worldwide, Pettigrew co-developed, along with A.V. Lakshminarayanan, and installed the cardiac imaging software on all of these systems. These included the first units at the Mayo Clinic, Wake Forrest University, and the NIH Clinical Center and several systems in Europe. In 1984, Pettigrew received a fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in their Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, created to help achieve more appropriate representation and inclusion of minority scientists and scholars in academia. As an RWJF fellow, he moved to Emory University School of Medicine in the Department of Radiology and continued his work in developing non-invasive cardiovascular imaging employing nuclear medicine and MRI. At Emory, he partnered with scientists at Philips Medical Systems to develop the first industrial cardiovascular MRI software package (Philips Cardiac Package, 1988). In 1989, when the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) held its Diamond Jubilee 75th Anniversary meeting, then hailed as the largest medical meeting in the world, Pettigrew delivered the invited keynote, the Eugene Pendergrass New Horizons Lecture. This talk, titled Four Dimensional Cardiac MRI: Diagnostic Procedure of the Future, predicted the advanced medial technological approach being realized and built upon today. In the 1990s, through appointments as professor in the Department of Cardiology at the Emory University School of Medicine, where he directed the Emory Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, and in the Department of Bioengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, his research continued to focus on applying MRI to the diagnosis of a variety of cardiac disorders, quantifying heart-wall function, imaging coronary arteries, and in quantifying blood flow across heart valves and in vessels, including congenital heart anomalies.
Transition to NIH In 2002, Pettigrew was named the first director of NIBIB, after contentious and prolonged effort by the national medical imaging and bioengineering communities to establish an NIH institute that is dedicated to advancing health through these catalytic fields, known to be engines of scientific progress. Of historical note is that Congress passed the bill to establish NIBIB (the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering Establishment Act) just before Christmas recess in 2000, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law as the last legislative act of his presidency.
NIBIB: 2002-2007 Under Pettigrew's direction, NIBIB achieved rapid scientific growth and influence. The initial federal appropriation doubled and applications quadrupled from year 1 to year 2, bringing a new community of physical scientists and engineers into the NIH community. More than half of these applications were from investigators new to NIH. NIBIB partnered with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute led by Thomas Cech to train the next generation of medical researchers at the interface of the physical and life sciences and engineering. Pettigrew also conceived the NIBIB Quantum Grants Program, designed to target major medical problems that would be transformative for health care and could be solved by technological innovation over a decade. In remarks made in 2007, Pettigrew called the Quantum Program awards "Medical Moonshots," an analogy to President Kennedy's 1961 challenge to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
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