Professor Gary Hardiman, PhD – Chief Technical Officer
Prof. Gary Hardiman joined QUB in 2018 as the Chair in Food Systems Biology. The Hardiman laboratory at QUB works in the field of systems biology the objective of which is the study of biological systems, including genes, RNAs, proteins, metabolites, and cells in a focused manner, and organs, organisms and populations in a broader context. Current areas of research focus are studying the effects of microplastics on marine and human health; prostate cancer in the context of racial differences and nutritional deficiency; examining the impacts of long-term space travel – specifically the effects of nutrition, torpor, space radiation and microgravity on hepatic and intestinal biology; developing a rat model of opioid abuse; optimizing toolkits for better integration of Omics data sets into genotype- phenotype predictions; and computational analysis to interpret the development of metabolic diseases mediated by non-coding RNAs.
Before moving to Belfast, Hardiman spent his academic career in California and South Carolina, USA.
Most recently Hardiman was Scientific Director of the Center for Genomics Medicine Bioinformatics and a full professor in the Departments of Medicine and Public Health Sciences at The Medical University of South Carolina. He was also Head, Laboratory for Marine Systems Biology, Hollings Marine Laboratory, an Adjunct Professor & Visiting Scholar, Grice Marine Laboratory, College of Charleston. He held faculty appointments at the Bioinformatics & Medical Informatics Research Center (BMIRC) and Computational Science Research Center (CSRC), San Diego State University, San Diego and the Department of Medicine at University of California, San Diego. He was the Founding Director of the UCSD Biomedical Genomics Facility (BIOGEM). He served on the advisory boards of several companies including OnRamp Bioinformatics, San Diego, CA; Axikin, La Jolla, CA; Autogenomics, Carlsbad, CA; Molecular Stamping, Trento, Italy. Before returning to academia in 2000, he worked in the biotech industry as a Senior Scientist, at Axys Pharmaceuticals (Quest Diagnostics) in Cambridge, MA; La Jolla, CA & San Francisco, CA.
Hardiman received his BSc. Hons. & Ph.D. degrees in Microbiology/Molecular Biology from the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) in 1989 and 1993 respectively. He was a University of California/National University of Ireland Education Abroad Scholar and received graduate training at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1992). He completed two post-doctoral research fellowships at DNAX Research Institute (MERCK), Palo Alto, CA (1993-1998) in the area of genomics and bioinformatics.
Hardiman serves on the editorial board of the journals ‘Pharmacogenomics’ and ‘Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics’ and the MDPI published ‘Genes’. He is the editor of three books on genomics technologies, ‘Microarray Methods and Applications’ published by DNA Press, Inc. (2003), ‘Biochips as Pathways to Drug Discovery’ with Dr. Andrew Carmen, published by CRC Press (2007) and ‘Microarray Innovations – Technology & Experimentation’ (2009). He has collaborated with NASA, The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) on the Deepwater Horizon incident, and the Lipid Maps Consortium.