Andy Gardner

Andy Gardner is the winner of ESEB’s 2007 John Maynard Smith Prize. He was born on 14 January 1980 and is a British citizen.

Andy Gardner finished his undergraduate studies in zoology at the University of Dundee, U.K., in 2001 before moving on to the University of Edinburgh to study towards a Ph.D. in theoretical population genetics with Professors Nick Barton and Stuart West. The topic of his thesis was to develop improved theories for the understanding of social evolution. He successfully defended this thesis in 2005 while already holding a Coleman postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where he worked with Professor Peter Taylor and Troy Day. There he became involved in teaching courses on modelling techniques, calculus and applied mathematics and statistics. By 2006 Andy Gardner returned to Europe on a Junior Research Fellowship at St. John’s College, Oxford. Since 2007, he holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh. During his career, Andy Gardner received a number of distinctions such as the Thomas Henry Huxley Award for the best PhD thesis in zoology, awarded by the Zoological Society of London, and he has presented his work on numerous occasions during conferences and invited seminars. He is an author on more than twenty original scientific contributions published in the top journals of the field.

Andy Gardner is a theoretical biologist who, at the same time, has an excellent understanding of natural history and the relevant biology of a question. He has worked on a variety of organisms, including bacteria, malaria parasites, wasps, fish and humans and uses a large variety of approaches. Among his achievements are developing the theoretical underpinnings to the phenomenon of spite, with applications chemical warfare in bacteria or for sterile castes in parasitoid wasps, and the study of sex ratio variation in infecting parasite populations. His current research interests focus on the development of evolutionary theory to study social behaviour in microbes and the role of ecological competition for the evolution of altruistic behaviour. Beyond the mere basic interest in understanding the evolution of signalling, these studies may also hold promise for a better understanding of medically important phenomena such as quorum sensing in pathogenic bacteria.