Prof. Paul Rainey

Paul Rainey is professor of evolutionary genetics at the NZ Institute for Advanced Study and Principle Investigator at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology & Evolution. He is also Visiting Professor at Stanford (where he is co-director of the Hopkins Microbial Diversity Programme), a James Cook Research Fellow, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ. In 2011 he was appointed Member of the Max Planck Society and External Scientific Member (Honorary Director) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Ploen, Germany.

He was born in Christchurch. During his youth he became interested in many things biological: plants, fungi, bacteria; their interactions, their genetics, but mostly, their evolution. He completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury and in 1989 went to Cambridge where he worked as a post doctoral fellow. In 1991 he took a post at the (then) NERC Institute for Virology & Environmental Microbiology in Oxford. In 1994 he was awarded a BBSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, which saw him move to the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, where he spent a happy and profitable decade. In 1996 he was appointed to a faculty position at Oxford, a fellowship at St Cross College, and a stipendiary lectureship at Wadham. With much dedication, he also ran his College's wine cellar.

In 2003 he returned to New Zealand as Chair of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Auckland, but retained a fractional professorial position at Oxford (until the end of 2005). In 2007 he moved his lab to Massey University's Albany campus. In 2006 he built a hut on Great Barrier Island where he spends as much time as possible.