The Wallace T. Miller, Sr. Endowed Professorship

Wallace T. Miller

Established in 2000 by the Pendergrass Foundation, the chair supports a professor in the Department of Radiology and honors Wallace T. Miller, Sr., MD (1932–2013), an outstanding radiologist and much-loved teacher who served on the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine for over 50 years.

Dr. Miller arrived at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) for a fellowship in radiology in 1960. Apart from two years in the U.S. Navy, he spent his career at HUP, where he held leadership positions, including Vice Chair of the Department. He retired in 2012.

Known as a fascinating storyteller who loved recalling his roots in Appalachia, Dr. Miller won many teaching awards, including the Medical Students Government Teaching Award and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

For his extraordinary diagnostic skills, Dr. Miller was selected for the I.S. Ravdin Master Clinician Award by his colleagues and for one of the profession’s highest honors, the Gold Medal Award from the Radiological Society of North America.

 

Christos DavatzikosCurrent Chairholder:
Christos Davatzikos, PhD

Christos Davatzikos, PhD is the Wallace T. Miller, Sr. Professor of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine, with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Systems Engineering and joint appointments with the Bioengineering and Applied Math Graduate Groups at Penn. He received his undergraduate degree at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1989 and PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1994. He joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as Assistant Professor (1995) and later Associate Professor (2001) of Radiology. In 2002, he moved to Penn to direct the Section for Biomedical Image Analysis, and in 2013, he established the Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics. His interests are in the field of imaging informatics, with an emphasis on machine learning and pattern analysis. His clinical/translational focus has been in computational neuroscience and computational neuro-oncology, including brain aging, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and brain cancer. Dr. Davatzikos is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a member of various editorial boards.

Previous Chairholders

  • E. Scott Pretorius, MD 2001–2006
  • Elias Melhem, MD 2007–2012