Professor Peter Teddy DPhil, FRACS, FFPMANZCA

Professor Teddy has full-time appointments as Neurosurgeon to The Royal Melbourne Hospital, Western Hospital, and Northern Hospital and has a private practice admission rights at The Melbourne Private Hospital. He is Professorial Fellow in Neurosurgery in the Department of Surgery at Melbourne University.

A New Zealand national, he was educated in the UK, entering the University of Oxford Medical School as a Hobson Memorial Scholar and winning the Radcliffe Infirmary Prizes in both Medicine and Surgery before graduating in 1973.

Prior to completing his clinical studies he undertook, as a Medical Research Council Scholar, a three-year period of research culminating in the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford. This work was conducted in the Department of The Regius Professor of Medicine working in the field of neurotransmitters in the brain under the supervision of, among others, Professor Sir George Pickering and Professor Sir Hans Krebs.

He gained FRCS (Eng) in 1977 and his post-Fellowship neurosurgical training was based predominantly in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary, but with time spent at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town and a highly prized, lengthy secondment to the Universitaetsspital, Zurich, working closely with the world-renowned Professor Gazi Yasargil.

Appointed consultant neurosurgeon in Oxford in 1981, he gained vast experience in virtually all areas of neurosurgical practice and developed sub-specialist interests in the neurosurgical treatment of intractable pain, functional (mainly spinal) neurosurgery, intrinsic tumours of the spinal cord, and neurosurgical sequelae of spinal cord injury. He became Head of the Department of Neurological Surgery in the late 1990s.

At various times he also was Director of Clinical Studies at the Oxford Medical School, Director of Neuroscience at The Radcliffe Infirmary, Assistant Editor of the British Journal of Neurosurgery, and was made Senior Research Fellow at his College, St Peter’s.

Peter moved to Melbourne in 2004 being almost simultaneously awarded FRACS and Fellowship of The Faculty of Pain Medicine, ANZ College of Anaesthetists in 2005 as well as Emeritus Fellow at St Peter’s College.

Aside from general neurosurgical practice, he fulfils an active role in teaching undergraduates and neurosurgical trainees and is Supervisor of Training for the Faculty of Pain Medicine in the College of Anaesthetists. He is a member of the Human Research Ethics Committee for Melbourne Health, and of the Editorial Committee for The Journal of Clinical Neuroscience.

Membership of surgical societies is wide-ranging but includes The Neurosurgical Society of Australasia, The Society of British Neurological Surgeons, and The Society of University Neurosurgeons.