Rate My Professor Paul Gardner

Associate Professor Paul Gardner holds the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry within the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Otago, where he has been employed since January 2018. Previously, he served as Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury from June 2011 to January 2018, and as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Fundamental Sciences at Massey University from April 2000 to April 2003. Gardner earned his PhD in Biomathematics from Massey University in 2003 and holds a degree in Mathematics from the same institution, completed in 2000. His academic career has been marked by a focus on computational biology and bioinformatics.

Gardner's research encompasses three primary strands: RNA biology, with emphasis on the functional characterization of non-coding RNAs and the effects of promiscuous RNA:RNA interactions on translation; analysis of genome variation, identifying functionally significant convergent evolutionary signals through high-density transposon mutagenesis and comparative genomics; and the benchmarking, evaluation, and improvement of bioinformatic tools using methods such as curation of positive and negative control datasets, meta-analysis, and meta-science approaches. Key publications include 'Pervasive transcription in the human genome exceeds background noise' in Genome Biology & Evolution (2026, with Adey et al.), 'Towards a phylogenetically informed approach to solving protein-protein interactions' in Biochemical Society Transactions (2025, with Lim et al.), 'Evaluating computational tools for protein-coding sequence detection: Are they up to the task?' in RNA (2025, with Champion et al.), and 'A bioinformatician, computer scientist, and geneticist lead bioinformatic tool development—which one is better?' in Bioinformatics Advances (2025). His contributions extend to expertise in bioinformatics benchmarks, software development, ncRNA, data curation, applied machine learning, data science, genetics variation, RNA, and non-coding RNA. Gardner's research is funded by the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, MBIE Smart Ideas, the Marsden Fund, the Bio-Protection CoRE, and the Biomolecular Interaction Centre. He was promoted to associate professor at the University of Otago Department of Biochemistry in 2020.