A/Professor Puma Sundaresan is a Radiation Oncologist with clinical and research interests in head and neck cancers. Puma works for the Sydney West Cancer Network including Westmead and Blacktown Hospitals in NSW. She has particular interest in treatment related decision making by patients and clinicians, quality of life (QOL) and patient reported outcomes following cancer treatment and health services research.

Puma completed her medical training at Flinders University in Adelaide and worked at Concord and Royal Prince Alfred Hospitals in Sydney as a junior medical officer prior to embarking on specialist training in radiation oncology at Westmead Hospital. She subsequently undertook a postgraduate Fellowship in intracranial stereotactic radiosurgery at Sydney Radiosurgery in 2009. As one of the inaugural Dean’s Fellows of The University of Sydney, she then embarked on a clinician scientist pathway to complete a PhD while working as a clinician at the Department of Radiation Oncology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. She was awarded the Withers & Peters Fellowship Prize, a NHMRC PhD scholarship and the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer QOL Fellowship in 2011.

Puma has since worked as the Deputy Director of Radiation Oncology at the Central Coast Cancer Centre and returned to Western Sydney in 2014 to join the Sydney West Radiation Oncology Network.  

Puma is a member of the Radiation Oncology Research Committee of the RANZCR, a Director on the Board of the Trans-Tasman Radiation Oncology Group and a Member of the Clinical Oncology Society of Australia. She is actively involved with teaching and research supervision of students at The University of Sydney and at Western Sydney University.  She is associate editor and reviewer for international peer reviewed journals and has authored a number of publications, book chapter and conference presentations.