Dr Pilgrim graduated from Monash University gaining his fellowship in General Surgery at The Alfred, Melbourne. He was the Upper Gastrointestinal Surgery fellow before commencing his PhD through the University of Melbourne at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in 2009. He then completed a second fellowship in Surgical Oncology/Hepatopancreaticobiliary (HPB) Surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin, USA 2012.
He has published extensively in journals such as the British Journal of Surgery, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Annals of Surgery, JAMA – Surgery and HPB on pancreas, liver and gallbladder cancer.
Dr Pilgrim is a serving Lieutenant Colonel and military surgeon with the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps having deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a senior lecturer at Monash University and a senior trauma instructor and examiner for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He is also a member of the RACS Academy of Surgical Educators and the Section of Academic Surgery as well as a Committee Member of the Military Surgery Section and an International Fellow of American College of Surgeons (FACS).
He is a member of the International HPB Association (IHPBA), the Americas HPB Association (AHPBA), the Australian & New Zealand HPB Association (ANZHPBA), the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the Australian Military Medicine Association (AMMA) and the Australasian Gastrointestinal Trials Group (AGITG) where he serves on the Upper GI cancer working party. He is the Principal investigator for the Biliary module of the Upper GI Cancer Registry and the Site Lead at The Alfred for the Pancreas module of the same registry and was the co-chair of the Victorian Integrated Cancer Services Pancreas Cancer Tumour summit 2017 convened by the Department of Health and Human Services and Cancer Council Victoria.