Dr. Roderic I. Pettigrew
Physicist
Roderic Ivan Pettigrew was born in Waynesboro in 1951 to Cleveland and Edwina Pettigrew. His father was a former president of Fort Valley State University, an HBCU founded in Fort Valley, Georgia, in 1895. Pettigrew attended Monroe High School in Albany, Georgia, and was able to forego his senior year of high school, attending Morehouse College instead on a full scholarship. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1972. Afterward, Pettigrew attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, earning a master’s degree in nuclear science.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pettigrew earned his Ph.D. in applied radiation physics in 1977. Two years later, he obtained a medical degree in radiology at the University of Miami Medical School in Florida. After his residency at Emory University in Atlanta, Pettigrew pursued additional training in nuclear medicine at the University of California, San Diego. In 1983, Pettigrew commenced a position as a clinical research scientist at Picker International. There, Pettigrew began work in developing a system for four-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, for the heart.
Pettigrew then held faculty appointments at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, where he taught cardiology, radiology, and bioengineering. In 2002, he became director of the Emory Center for Magnetic Resonance Research. Pettigrew later left Atlanta to become the founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2017, he left NIBIB for Texas A&M University, where he is the chief executive officer of EnHealth and executive dean for EnMed.
Atlanta History Resource Center