Etta D. Pisano, MD

Dr. Etta Pisano has served as the Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Radiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School since November 2015. She also has served as the Senior Director for Research Development at the Center for Research and Innovation at the American College of Radiology since July 2015. She is also currently serving as the Study Chair for The Tomosynthesis Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial, a National Cancer Institute-funded clinical trial under the auspices of the ECOG-ACRIN research base, which will enroll over 165,000 women in 150 sites in the US and Canada.

Prior to her current roles, she served at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) as Vice President for Medical Affairs and Dean of the College of Medicine and as Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, Kenan Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, Director of the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center, and Director of the N.C. Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute. She is an expert in breast cancer imaging and, for almost 16 years, she served as the Chief of Breast Imaging at UNC Hospitals. Her undergraduate degree in Philosophy is from Dartmouth College and her medical degree is from Duke University. Etta’s professional interests center around the development, application and testing of imaging technology for the early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer and other breast problems.

Etta was born in New York City and was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. After completing a rotating internship in a community-based program in Pensacola, Florida, she completed her radiology residency at Beth Israel Hospital of Harvard Medical School. After her residency, she spent a year as Chief of Breast Imaging and Instructor in Radiology at the same institution. She is a Past President of the Association of University Radiologists and the American Association for Women Radiologists. Etta served as the Principal Investigator of the largest clinical trial ever run by a radiologist, the Digital Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial (DMIST), which enrolled 49,528 women in a study comparing digital to film mammography, the results of which were published in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2003, she was appointed the first Director of the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center, a core facility that develops and commercializes new imaging technologies.

In 2008 Etta was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a recipient of the Gold Medal from the Association of University Radiologists (2010), the American Roentgen Ray Society (2012), and the Radiologic Society of North America (2014) and of the Alice Ettinger Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Association for Women Radiologists (2012). At MUSC and UNC, Etta received honors for her work on behalf of faculty diversity. Etta received the National Women’s History Museum Helen Taussig Living Legacy Award in 2013.