2025 President’s Award

Prof Pantelis is an international leader in neuroimaging and neuropsychology of schizophrenia. He is a Clarivate highly cited scientist, publishing over 800 papers/chapters and 3 books. He has won several national and international awards, including the 2011 NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Grant from Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (US), the 2013 Robert Sommer Award (Justus Liebig University), and 2015 Danks Oration Medal at University of Melbourne.  In 2018 he was the 18th Paul Janssen lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, London (UK), and gave the 2018 Isaac Schweitzer Award Lecture at Biological Psychiatry Australia’s annual meeting. He was 2017-2018 Visiting Research Professor at Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and 2018-2019 Lundbeck Visiting Professor, Center for Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research, CNSR, University of Copenhagen. He was conferred a Doctor Honoris Causa from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2015 and elected to Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK) in 2018. He was recipient of the 2023 Senior Research Award of the Royal Australian & NZ College of Psychiatrists, and 2023 Founders Medal of the Society for Mental health Research (SMHR). He has been on various editorial boards, including Associate Editor for Psychological Medicine (2016-2020). 

A medical graduate of Melbourne University, Prof Pantelis undertook psychiatric training at Royal Free Hospital (including Friern Hospital) between 1983-1987, including 18 months as a research registrar (1985-1987) at University College London. He was Lecturer and Senior Registrar at Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School (1987-1992), where he undertook neuropsychological studies of schizophrenia for his doctoral thesis examining frontal-subcortical systems in schizophrenia (supervises: Thomas Barnes & Hazel Nelson) using the recently developed CANTAB battery (with Trevor Robbins, Cambridge). His work won him travel fellowships to visit the Weinberger lab at NIMH, where he commenced neuroimaging work.  

On returning to Melbourne in late 1992, he established the Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Research Unit at the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria (MHRI, director: David Copolov), and established neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies of schizophrenia and other disorders. His team worked closely with Patrick McGorry and Alison Yung to undertake brain imaging in those at ultra-high risk for psychosis. In collaboration with the Institute of Psychiatry (London) this led to the seminal paper in Lancet describing brain changes with onset of psychosis. Subsequent work elaborated the timing of brain and cognitive changes, while placing these within a neurodevelopmental context. He has examined the causes of brain changes, including the impact of stress (with Carmine Pariante / Paola Dazzan from IOP), and impact of cannabis and other drugs, as well as genetic determinants of brain change. This work helped Prof Pantelis (Scientific Director) and Prof Dennis Velakoulis (Clinical Director) to establish the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre (MNC, 2004-2023), a centre that grew to include clinical and research scientists and students undertaking neuropsychiatric research. The centre was instrumental in nurturing the careers of researchers and clinician-academics in neuropsychiatry both locally and internationally, including >20 Professors and Associate Professors, and other highly cited scientists.  

Prof Pantelis and members of MNC were successful in almost $100M in grants and fellowships. He established a resource of >8,000 multimodal brain scans, most recently in treatment-resistant schizophrenia. He is investigator in numerous international consortia. Recent work focuses on risk/resilience factors during neurodevelopment, and neurobiology of brain changes (incl. iron/oxidative stress), and studies of childhood schizotypy. In a recent $10M grant with Monash University colleagues (incl. Arthur Christopoulos), together Florey Institute (Jess Nithianantharajah) and RMIT University (Stavros Selemidis) he established a brain maturational and influenza-MIA model aiming to identify novel treatments targeting perturbed maturational trajectories relevant to schizophrenia.