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PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACT BOOK
I NV I T ED GUE S T S
Peter Gardner, Professor, Ph.D.
Peter Gardner is currently Professor of Analytical and Biomedical Spectroscopy in the
School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science at the University of Manchester,
UK. He obtained his BSc in Chemistry in 1984 and PhD in surface vibrational spectroscopy
in 1988, from the University of East Anglia, UK. He then spent four years at the Max Planck’s
Fritz-Haber Institute in Berlin using Infrared Reflection Absorption Spectroscopy (IRAS)
spectroscopy to monitor oscillatory reaction phenomenon on surfaces. It was while in Berlin
that he became a major user of synchrotron radiation at BESSY, using a range of surface
techniques such as PES, NEXAFS, and X-ray Photoelectron Diffraction often in conjunction
with vibrational spectroscopy. In 1992 he took a Post Doctoral position at the University of
Cambridge UK, combined with infrared studies of surface species under catalytic conditions.
In 1994 he moved to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
(UMIST) to set up is own research group and he was involved in pioneering the use of
synchrotron far-IR studies of oxide surfaces. It was at the synchrotron that he was introduced
to infrared micro-spectroscopy and developed his ideas for infrared analysis of single cells.
In 2006 he moved into the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, a flagship research centre
within the University of Manchester. He now runs a very successful bioscpectroscopy
group using infrared and Raman for medical diagnostic applications. His group has been
at the forefront of understanding scattering distortions in spectra and work on resonant
Mie scattering (RMieS) is now considered to be a seminal paper in the field. This has led to
the development of a RMieS correction programme that is now used by about 70 groups
worldwide. He has a strong interest in spectral pathology particularly related to prostate
cancer and has shown that both Gleason Score, Grade, and stage of the disease can in
principle be determined from the infrared spectra of the primary tumour.
He is well regarded in the field. He was a key member of the EU funded network Diagnostic
Applications of Synchrotron Infrared Microscopy (DASIM) and Chair of the single cell
spectroscopy group. He is head of the Clinical Infrared and Raman Spectroscopy (CLIRSPEC)
in the UK and is on the International Advisory Board of the SPEC: Shedding light on Disease
Conference Series.
